Blog: Agile & Business

Question: Automate Testing!

October 14, 2015

Dear Joe, In the course you emphasized how important it is to do many things….seemingly from the start.  One was automated testing.  This will be very hard for us to at my company.  Were you really serious that we must have automated testing immediately?!?!? Thanks, Janet **** Dear Janet, [First, I must confess that I […]

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The Management Scrum Team

September 11, 2015

This is an important idea that more and more people are talking about. One aspect: Managers can learn best what Scrum is and what agile is by being on a ‘real’ Scrum team. A more important aspect: Managers can be more effective on a multi-functional Scrum team. (Often.) *** STOP!  Why am I writing this […]

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Changing the culture through invitation and engagement

September 10, 2015

Some of you know my phrase: “People are remarkably good at doing what they want to do.” It is a down to earth way of saying: I think self-organization is the right thing. Or, I believe in freedom. Believing in freedom does not mean Congress will always vote the way you want.  Or even vote […]

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How to make the Whole Organization Agile

September 8, 2015

Steve Denning has written a short article summarizing his thoughts on this subject.  Very interesting. How To Make The Whole Organization Agile In the article you will see links to his blog posts and a mention of his book: The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management. Enjoy!

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Teams that Finish Early Accelerate Faster

September 8, 2015

Jeff Sutherland has recommended this recent article: “Teams that Finish Early Accelerate Faster.” Here it is: teamsthatfinishearlyacceleratefaster What’s the deal? Well, many of us are seeing ‘scrum’ that is not … not achieving the results we would like to see.  I say it this way: we want everyone to achieve significantly better results.  Jeff Sutherland talks […]

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Question: Re Estimating with Story Points…

August 13, 2015

Dolores asks: Hi Joe – …I have always been taught that story points should never be compared to time measurements. However, we were using 1 story point = a day or a day and a half of work to estimate initial team velocity. One of the questions we often get about scrum is how do points […]

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Aggressively Attack the Impediments

August 6, 2015

We can look at impediments or continuous improvement many ways. In Scrum, we usually look at impediments as continuous improvement for one [Scrum] team at a time. Note: Of course, we can think of impediments for a scaled group of teams or for the agile adoption, and for other kinds of things. Not for today, […]

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State of Agile Survey 2015 – Version One

July 28, 2015

Version One does an annual survey of the state of agile.  Very useful. I am not sure it is a scientific survey, but it tries and generally gives some useful insight. See here. To me, it says progress is being made.  That is, more people are using Agile, and lives are getting better.  That is […]

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Scrum requires Effort

June 30, 2015

It seems many people expect Scrum to make magic happen by itself. This is of course an illogical expectation. It is true that Scrum (the roles, meetings and artifacts) will, with a bit of introduction, cause your team to get better without much additional effort or investment. But the real power of Scrum comes when […]

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Short Scrum and Long Scrum

June 20, 2015

There are many ways to play Scrum. In some sense, Scrum is infinitely flexible. Let us pretend for a moment, there are only two types of Scrum, which I will call Short Scrum and Long Scrum. Short Scrum In Short Scrum, a Sprint might be completed in one day.  So, we do not have a […]

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