A Business Model Canvas is an easy to use, lightweight and powerful tool for anyone looking to sketch out business models. It is quickly becoming the preferred strategic management tool for start-up organizations. While it is available in .pdf form from Alex Osterwalder’s site, I couldn’t help but feel that companies could benefit from an [...]
Archive | Guest Post RSS feed for this section
Guest post: Planning Poker – The Power of Two
To plan an Agile project most teams play Planning Poker to estimate the size of user stories. Tools are available like a deck of cards, paper or nowadays even Apple/Android apps. Simplicity is one of our Agile principles and The Power of Two practice allows you to play Planning Poker without any need for these [...]
Guest post: Specialized Skills
Whether we’re talking about revolutionary new web services, IT systems to automate internal procedures, or products to sell in boxes, there are many different sorts of things that need to be done. We need to envision the product, decide what’s required to be done, design it, build it, make sure it works, and put it [...]
Guest post: What is an Agile Coach
Recently a friend asked about the definition of the title, “Agile Coach.” Googling “agile coach” informs me that there are about 205,000 pages with that term. Obviously the term is in widespread use. I don’t typically call myself an Agile Coach, though I’ll use that term informally if it’s the term used by those with [...]
Guest post: The IT Manager’s Dilemma with Software Debt
The team continues to complain about working with that legacy codebase because it has so much debt. That software debt slows them down in feature delivery and they are wondering if we can push for priority to be put into paying it back some?” asked the ScrumMaster. The IT Development Manager looked distraught about the [...]
Guest post: Managing Software Debt
Managing Software Debt Continued Delivery of High Values as Systems Age Many software developers have to deal with legacy code at some point during their careers. Seemingly simple changes are turned into frustrating endeavors. Code that is hard to read and unnecessarily complex. Test scripts and requirements are lacking, and at the same time are [...]
Guest post: Artful Agile
When the global Agile Tour made it’s 2011 stop in Sydney, little did we know that a new Agile game was about to be born. The Sydney leg of the tour was a fantastic couple of days full of wholehearted interaction and efficient, self-organizing groups. The opportunity to create a new Agile game was presented to [...]
Guest post: Scrum is the Vehicle, Not the Destination
Have you ever heard or said any of these phrases? We are going to implement the Scrum methodology. We’re doing a modified Scrum. Our developers are using a Scrum process. These may seem like innocuous statements but they are indicators of potential misinterpretation of how Scrum is best utilized. Scrum is not a full development [...]
Guest post: Avoiding Iteration Zero
Teams new to Agile often realize that they have a lot to do before they get their new development process at full speed. Looking at this big and unknown hill in front of them, many Agile teams choose to do an Iteration Zero (or Sprint Zero) to prepare before they start delivering regular increments of [...]
Guest Post: Affinity Estimating – A How-To
At the last Scrum Trainer’s Retreat in Boston, MA, Lowell Lindstrom presented a 30-minute exercise on Affinity Estimating. Kane Mar has written a short blog entry on this technique for sizing a large Product Backlog here. I would like to add some context for the exercise and a step-by-step that I have found useful since [...]
Guest post: Mastering the sidle.
Have you ever noticed when you have a team conversation, and agreement seems to be reached? Beware! There will be a sidle. Watch for it, be prepared for it. Don’t avoid it. What is the sidle? The sidle is simply, one person who hangs back … the conversation after the conversation; the hallway conversation; the [...]
Guest Post: Reflections on Scrum and Kanban
Done and done! 1,5 years of hard work at National Land Survey is over. What a great project! This post will be on my personal findings about Scrum team transition to Kanban. What worked and what not? Moreover, I will try to analyze the failures we made and to come up with some solutions. Let’s [...]
Guest Post: Using the power of “AND”
I was discussing the standup ritual the other day with some peers in some ScrumMaster training. We were discussing smells and anti-patterns in agile – and the discussion strayed to the team members that quickly belt out: “Working-on-AD-49238-yesterday-(Finished)-today-I’ll-work-on-AD-42938-no-blockers-NEXT” What value does this add to anyone? Did this … Doing that … No blockers. No respect, [...]
Guest Post: Dealing with Split teams and Communication
Today we implemented a blanket Ban on emails! We have a situation where our team is split between two locations; that’s bad. To compound this, one location has developers, and another has testers. You can already see that this story is not a happy one! The team is new at Agile, and majority of one [...]
Guest Post: Using a Retrospective for Personal Performance Reviews
Introduction: This is our second guest post from Jonathan Coleman. I first working with Jonathan over a decade ago on the Land Information NZ project. His first guest post was back in February, 2011 when he wrote about “Agile @ Home – Finances which later became his talk for Agile 2011. In this post Jonathan [...]
Guest post: Agile @ Home – Finances!
Introduction: This guest post is from Jonathan Coleman. I first working with Jonathan over a decade ago on the Land Information NZ project. He was a pleasure to work with then, and it’s been great getting to know him again after all this time. Jon recently send this post for review … and I enjoyed [...]