Blog: Agile & Business

Getting Better

June 26, 2011

My guess, based on experience and many conversations, is that these are ‘our’ top 5 impediments. Need better Product Owners Not enough focus on removing impediments Need better automated testing Technical debt No trend of improving velocity Some time ago, Jeff Sutherland said the biggest impediment is team’s not getting to done-done inside the Sprint.  […]

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Getting personal

June 25, 2011

One of the things I like most about Scrum is that it makes people, well, personal. It allows people to be themselves. One of the best suggestions I ever heard for living was: Love your neighbor as yourself. (Might I be a touch sarcastic? Still, I also mean the message quite straightforwardly.) Of course, as […]

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Business Value is a dream

June 20, 2011

There is a famous Taoist story about a person dreaming that he is a butterfly and awakens and can’t decide: Am I person who dreamt I was a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming I am now a person? This is not the kind of dream I meant, when I used that word in […]

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CSM Course + Workshop: Why?

June 12, 2011

My colleague Catherine Louis got me, reluctantly at the time, to do a workshop at the end of a Certified ScrumMaster course, and then a client wanted the workshop with the course. (I have done many courses with workshops since then.) Now I am ‘hooked.’ As I have said before, the feedback from participants is […]

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Planning Poker – 1

June 9, 2011

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 […]

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Scrum & Control

June 7, 2011

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 […]

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Purpose of the Daily Scrum

June 6, 2011

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 […]

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Public Impediment List!

May 24, 2011

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 […]

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Technical Debt

May 19, 2011

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 […]

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Jeff Sutherland video: Basics of Scrum

May 19, 2011

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.

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