Blog: Agile & Business

Radical Management

March 6, 2013

Steve Denning has written a great agile book for managers, called The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management. Here are the five principles: A shift in the goal of making money for shareholders to delighting customers through continuous innovation. A shift in the role of managers from controlling individuals to enabling self-organizing teams. A shift in […]

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6 Myths of Product Development

March 6, 2013

This is a very useful article in the HBR, by Stefan Thomke and Donald Reinertson.  Reinertson is well known in the lean-agile community.  It is excellent.  Go here to buy it for $6.  Well worth it. Here are the myths or fallacies they mention: 1. High utilization of resources will improve performance. By ‘resources’ they […]

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Do only high benefit/cost work!

March 5, 2013

Tom DeMarco wrote an article a while ago: “Software Engineering: An idea whose time has come and gone?” (2009)  I guess I am just catching up on my reading. One topic is: are metrics useful? I think the real issue is: how useful is it that we ‘control’ projects? His comparison is: 1. If we […]

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High Priority Interrupt Work in Scrum

March 5, 2013

Imagine that you have new, high priority work, that gets identified during the sprint.  In other words, you don’t even know many of the stories or issues or tickets until after the Sprint Planning Meeting.  A support team is a classic example of this. How do you organize things in Scrum to handle this? The […]

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Kent McDonald on Release Planning

March 3, 2013

Here is a good article on release planning. Includes a video. Enjoy.

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The Term ‘Release Planning’

March 3, 2013

Is the term ‘Agile Release Planning’ useful? Mike Cohn has a good blog post about this, here. I agree and slightly disagree. First, we need to state the obvious principles. It is important, as far as possible, to be clear and consistent about what a word or phrase means. Release Planning normally implies planning for […]

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Agile Release Planning Booklet ver 1.08

March 3, 2013

Here is my latest Agile release planning booklet: “Joe’s Approach to Agile Release Planning.”  31 pages, including a table of contents.  Free now. PDF format. Some ideas or explanations are included, but mostly actionable steps. Feedback welcome.  jhlittle@kittyhawkconsulting.com

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2012 Agile Dev Survey

March 1, 2013

Once again, agile and scrum are making more progress in the real world. Is the world all rosy now?   Well, that depends.  Compared to last year, in terms of Agile, I think things are better.  Compared to where we could be, we have a long way to go. People still like central planning too […]

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Early Warning System

February 28, 2013

I was giving a course today, and we were discussing: should we do agile release planning at the beginning of the effort? (Reminder: release planning always also means release plan refactoring every sprint, to whatever degree it is needed.) My advice is: most teams I see need agile release planning for a day or two […]

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The ScrumButt Test

February 24, 2013

Bas Voode designed a test with 7 or 8 items.  Jeff Sutherland and others liked it.  Jeff modified it some.  Eventually it became known as the ScrumButt Test.  Bas developed the test originally to check whether a team was still really using Scrum or reverting back to waterfall.  Or, reverting to what I call Cowboy […]

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