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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
How to do Agile performance reviews
My last post of Performance reviews and Scrum left some readers unsatisfied. Brett send me an email where he comments: So, while my heart leapt when I saw this link, sadly I was bitterly disappointed to discover that despite the fact its one of your most frequently asked questions, you ...
Performance evaluations and Scrum.
ne of the most frequently ask questions that I’m asked is, how do you do personal performance reviews and appraisals in a Scrum environment. Part of the difficulty is that the Scrum framework talks about three equally balanced roles; the Product Owner, the ScrumMaster and the Team. If the roles ...
An overview of Agile Contracts
Part 1 and Part 2. We’re all familiar with the Agile Manifesto but sometimes it’s unclear how to interpret the principle without some concrete examples. The third item, customer collaboration over contract negotiation, is a good example of this. We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it ...
Scrum and Fixed Price Contracts
Fixed Priced contracts don’t make a great deal of sense in a Scrum world. This is really because traditional software development and Agile software development are two different paradigms … and solutions that work in one paradigm often doesn’t make sense in another. This difference is paradigm is best explained ...
Estimate the total cost of Agile projects
Estimating the cost of software is, at best, an educated guess. We try to pretend this is not the case, yet despite all the new ideas and models, software is still costed in the same way it was when I left university 20 years ago. There are so many complexities ...
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 ...

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 [...]
Weekend Reading
This video documentary is so worthwhile watching. It’s about an game arcade built out of cardboard boxes and packing tape. Great stuff especially when news of Caine’s Arcade hit the ‘front page of the internet’. And also … You’re on a racing yacht, 650 miles from the finish line of the fifth leg of an [...]

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 [...]
Weekend Reading
I really enjoyed this info graphic showing the rise and fall of online empires. With the exception of AOL, I’ve had an account on every one of these services. The ‘net has changed (and continues to change) very quickly. Via: CenturyLinkQuote.comInteresting links from the interwebs … The Costs of a Struggling Team #Scrum #Agile @neribr [...]

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 [...]

