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“No one should spend their lives on meaningless work.” This was the first sentence I underlined in the latest book by Scrum co-creator, Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time.  This simple sentence speaks to fundamental reason why Scrum exists in...

A while back, I made the claim in one of the Agile LinkedIn groups that writing use cases was one aspect of being a professional software developer.  That naturally received a bunch of push back from people who felt use cases were too heavyweight.  Many people claimed user...

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...

Why does writing user stories have to suck so much? I recently heard from a colleague that they were looking for some ideas, tricks, tips and techniques to make user story writing more innovative so they can build a delightful product.  Definitely a good idea, but running a good...

I have written on user stories before, so please understand that I love user stories.  When used thoughtfully, I feel user stories can be a very powerful way to create a collaborative dynamic between the business and product developers.  User stories have the innate ability to...

During the second half of 2012, I wrote an article describing some challenges I had regarding my Certified Product Owner (CPO) course and how I achieved a breakthrough in my understanding about the class – trust the learners.  What a new and amazing concept?! Since then, I...

For a while my Certified Product Owner (CPO) class was bugging me.  It was OK, but it something about it was off.  People were writing good evaluations, but the class was not on the same level of quality as my Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) class.  Now part of this reason is that my...

User stories are tool that originated from Extreme Programming and have become the de facto way Agile teams document and collect their requirements.  There is a lot written on user stories (link, link, link), so I am just going to talk about what I consider important in writing...

Stopped in today to J.B. Rainsberger’s interesting discussion about his big misses in the last nine or so years.  He used an interesting format of people sitting in a circle instead of sitting around conference room tables.  Here is a list of the interesting ideas I jotted...