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 [...]
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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: 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 [...]
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 didn’t actually answer it at [...]
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 are equally balanced then who [...]
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 and helping others do 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 by one of my favorite [...]
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 that it ultimately relies on [...]
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 [...]
Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland interviewed at ESE, Zurich
The co-creators of Scrum, Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, sat down for a long interview at the ESE conference in Zurich early this year (April, 2011). The entire interview is fantastic and covers a range of topics including the early history of Scrum, the Department of Defense mandating that iterative and incremental approaches be included [...]
How to cost Agile projects
How to cost Agile projects is a question that comes up frequently, and a perfect question for a blog post. It’s actually very easy but before I get to the heart of the matter I’d like to spend a few paragraphs setting the context of the question. Costing software projects With many software project approaches [...]
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 [...]
Zombie User Stories … User Stories that return from the dead!
Some User Stories that never seem to die. No matter how hard you work on them they get carried over to the next Sprint … Sprint after Sprint after Sprint. Welcome to the nightmare of Zombie User Stories(*)! Zombie (User) Stories are a bad thing for a number of reasons; first, they sap the teams [...]
Does collocation impact collaboration?
The Scrum community has long recognized that collocation is important to collaboration. Until recently there has been little in the way of formal studies that support this point of view, although there has been a lot of anecdotal evidence. It appears that the tide is turning. Within the last six months I’ve seen two really [...]