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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...

Concerned about the underrepresentation of women and minorities in software?  Interested in breaking the cycle of poverty in your community?  If these challenges concern you, then June Clarke and Nicole Clague have an interesting proposition – offer your time and share your...

This was a really good question in the Scrum Practitioners LinkedIn group.  What started out as a short response, became a blog post so I decided to share my ideas here as well. Scrum is silent on the topic of specifications – it neither requires them nor prohibits them.  I...

Links to share with your friends and co-workers Is an Agile PMO possible? – Curt Finch talks about the values of both Agile practices, PMI standards and how to marry the two. Self-organization: the secret sauce for improving your Scrum team – In this 90-miute video...

Excellent links for everyone to share. Pollyanna Pixton on Agile Leadership – a 30-minute video talking about the factors corporate leaders can influence which support Agile teams. How I Learned to Program Manage an Agile Team After 6 Years of Waterfall – Sara Ford...

Here are some links to the best of the blogs since the beginning of the year. The Role of Leaders on a Self-Organizing Team – Mike Cohn talks about the important role management continues to play on Scrum teams. Agile Scales, Waterfall Doesn’t – or s...

Just wanted to reiterate the value of TDD – I am working on a programming challenge and was surprised how easy it was to add a hunting and killing algorithm to my program.  Since it was written using TDD, I had a nice suite of fast tests which allowed me to incrementally...

… they are too short. Mark Levison has posted an interesting article, Making TDD Stick, on InfoQ that covers some of my observations about how to sustain test-driven development (TDD) in an organization.  I have found the best way to teach TDD is to mentor\pair with an individual...

Spanish has an interesting word to explain the concept of “excessiveness” or “too much” – demasiado.  It can be used to talk about things, such as “Tenemos manzanas demasiadas”\”We have too many apples”, but interestingly enough it can also refer to people, as in “Él es...

“Test-driven development [TDD] is dual-entry bookkeeping to prevent errors in your code.” I was lucky enough to see Uncle Bob give a presentation on TDD this week.  During his demonstration of the Bowling Game, I noticed he refrained from writing tests for the all the...