“What are the Best Practices for Agile?” If I had a dollar for every time I have been asked this question, I could buy a weekend on Maui. This industry term has taken on a “silver bullet” quality. In our endless search for perfection, we lazily think that going through the motions of the best practitioners will get us the best results for ourselves. Read more…
I spent the week at the Seattle Scrum Gathering, starting with a day-long retreat for Certified Scrum Coaches and Trainers. I learned a lot this week and made a lot of notes about things to check out, new ideas, new tools, new people, etc. Then I left the gathering in a hurry to catch my plane and accidently left my notebook behind. I am pretty sure it got gathered up with the trash. So I had a great time but was bummed to lose my external memory. Yeah, I know, a modern person would take notes with an iPad and never let go of it. Oh well. If I promised you something, please send me a reminder. Read more…
In our last post, we described an exercise for discovering how traditional Project Management duties are shared by the 3 Scrum roles. We raised the question: Is there still enough left to justify a Project Manager? If not, what is the PM to do? Read more…
There is an exercise that I like to do in my ScrumMaster course to answer a frequently asked question: Where does the Project Manager fit in Scrum? Project Manager is not one of the Scrum roles so there is some confusion, especially among PMs who start using Scrum. Read more…
Agile software development is a big change for many organizations. The most typical pattern is to start with one or two small projects and then build on success with more projects. In time, a wider change in organizational process and culture is underway. If your company is about to take this journey into unfamiliar territory or if they have gone part way and are feeling a little uncertain about their current location in the Agile landscape, you should consider hiring an experienced guide. In the Agile world, this guide is called an Agile Coach. Here are some advantages of hiring a Coach to help you find the way. Read more…
In my early Agile days, we did not have a formal Definition of Done. We went by feel. If we were happy with the implementation from a design standpoint, if the story did what the Product Owner asked for, if it was fast enough for the user and if we did “enough” testing, then it was done. Since then, experience has suggested the need to be more precise about the criteria for “done”. It helps us to get agreement from all interested parties. Read more…