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26
FEB
2018

Play with Story Cubes & Write Better User Stories at XP 2018 Porto

February 2018 Lisbon, PT – Great news for people who want more from their user stories and for people looking to have more fun at work with Serious Games.  Carlton Nettleton will be taking his insights, ideas and Story Cubes® to help Scrum practitioners, Product Owners and...
29
NOV
2017

Want More Sad People At Work?

If the Team is not committed\bought in on using Scrum, will it work? No.  However, this is going to be true of any process you might adopt – Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming (XP) or traditional project management.  If the your team members are not truly curious to learn...
28
AUG
2017

How to manage documents? Should that be a new story?

Continuing with our discussion of documentation, I wanted to address how we actually build these documents within our Sprints (or iterations).  Remember our key Agile principles related to documentation: “working software is the primary measure of progress” and...
03
JUL
2017

How does the traditional functional and technical documentation work in Agile?

In Scrum and Agile, there is not much guidance given on functional and technical documentation.  The Agile Manifesto states that Agile teams value “working software over comprehensive documentation.”  That provides clear guidance on what is the focus of an Agile team,...
29
APR
2017

What books do you recommend reading on scaling Scrum and Agile?

     When scaling Scrum and Agile, many software organizations experience the common struggle to coordinate and prioritize the work of multiple teams working together, aka dependency management.  Many factors contribute to the complexity of identifying, tracking, managing and...
12
DEC
2016

Yesterday’s Weather: An Extreme Programming Planning Technique Using Story Points

Yesterday’s Weather is an Extreme Programming planning technique used to estimate the capacity of a Team based on their past performance. Yesterday’s Weather is a guide to help Teams neither under commit nor overcommit to a set of Product Backlog items during Sprint...
03
NOV
2016

What are the most common mistakes or misconceptions when organizations start Scrum?

Here are the three most common mistakes (in no particular order) that I see with my clients who are struggling to implement and sustain long-term Agile adoption. Weak Product Owners – without a Product Owner (PO), Scrum does not work.  Thankfully, most of my clients have...
19
JUL
2016

How to Improve Your Test-Driven Development

Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a fundamental programming skill in short supply today.  TDD is a powerful design technique that improves the quality and reliability of software as unit tests are automated and run more frequently.  One of the key concepts behind TDD is that the...
09
JUN
2016

How to Run a Coding Dojo

At Agile Portugal, I heard Emily Bache (@emilybache) give an inspiring keynote address on the importance of coding dojos to advance the art of programmers and testers.  Emily, much like myself, is a strong proponent of test-driven development (TDD), but recognizes that while TDD...
16
FEB
2016

Agile Principles: The Forgotten Half of the Agile Manifesto

Did you know that in addition to the Agile Manifesto that the authors listed their twelve principles of Agile software?  Based upon my very unscientific survey of recent CSM students, only about 20% to 30% of people who were simply aware the Agile Manifesto existed were also...