Yearly Archives: 2011

Planning Poker – 1

At Agile-Carolinas, Laurie Williams gave a great presentation last night on how she does Planning Poker. (Suggestion: Google her. She is a professor at NC State, but that is just the start. She is very good.) Some of the discussion made me realize that there are many issues out there. So, here is how I […]

Scrum & Control

One myth about Agile is, “Those Agile guys are out of control!” Of course, when one hears that, one must ask, what do you mean exactly? For example, Scrum does reveal that the team is involved in a creative process, a process of identifying what the customer wants and how it will be implemented and […]

Purpose of the Daily Scrum

What is the purpose of the Daily Scrum? First, how often do we have one? Obvious — daily! Well, apparently not so obvious to all. Some people think we need one twice a week. Let’s go back to the purpose. The purpose is to enable the team to make micro-adjustments in any dimension to land […]

Public Impediment List!

This is essential in Scrum. That is my opinion, and while an impediment list is not called out in the Scrum Guide, I think Jeff Sutherland would at least insist that the continuous removal of impediments is essential. Read his blog posts and form your own opinion. Why public? Well, so everyone can see and […]

Technical Debt

Here is a wonderful video by Ward Cunningham about Technical Debt. (Thanks to my friend James Collins for finding it on his iPad.) You may want to ‘Wikipedia’ Ward Cunningham, if you don’t know him well. There is some irony here, since Cunningham invented the wiki concept (a.k.a. wikiwikiweb) and implemented it first, and his […]

Jeff Sutherland video: Basics of Scrum

Nice video. Five minutes. Highly recommended. Complex adaptive systems — an important idea. [The videos were moved around. This seems the best link.] Other great videos on this same page now.

Little’s Second Law

One day I was writing down quotes to be printed in a HUGE font and put in the team room. On that day, I thought it would help (and actually, I think for that team, it did help). Anyway, this sentence came to me: People are remarkably good at doing what they want to do. […]

Tell Her No

Once upon a time, a long long time ago, there was a song called “Tell Her No” by the Zombies. I like to play it sometimes in the courses. Here is the song: A simple and stylish song with quite a message. I like to let the music tell the message. I think it reaches […]

Intermediate CSPO and Workshop

Thanks to Maria Diaconu and Dave Muldoon, and with the help of Catherine Louis and others, we have significantly revised our Certified Scrum Product Owner course. This has been in progress in a way for years. I have long thought that the CSPO course should be treated as a post-CSM course, a step beyond ‘beginner.’ […]

Lame Scrum Implementations

I was talking to a colleague about one problem, and then said, “but this is not our biggest problem — our biggest problem is lame scrum implementations.” So, I thought I would discuss that. First, truly, our biggest problem is not Scrum or anything to do with Scrum. Our biggest problem is to figure out […]