Category Archives: Better Agile

Essence – Other card sets

Ivar Jacobsen has put together cards that explain quickly many of the different agile “methods” or “tools.” (I would call User Stories a tool.)  Very useful. Here is a card set for User Stories: user_story_essentials_cards Here is a card set for “agile essential practices”: agile_essentials_practice_cards Enjoy! Use these with some of the Agile Games described […]

Read More »

Scrum Cards / Essence

Scrum cards: To many of you that will mean the Fibonacci cards, AKA Planning Poker (TM) cards. But NO!  At least not this time.  This time we mean the “scrum_cards” (that name is the title of the PDF file) that explain Scrum. Below is a link for the new version of the Scrum Cards (again, […]

Read More »

Webinar on Scrum Guide 2020 on March 21, 2023

Hi all, We talked through the Scrum Guide. Some questions came up: Q: Will you tell us exactly how Scrum works? Hmm.  The Scrum Guide kind of does that.  And I added to  that.  Still I am not sure it was “exactly” or “completely”.  There is always a lot more to add and you all […]

Read More »

Brian Marick

Brian Marick was on of the 17 signers of the Agile Manifesto. His quote is: “An example would be handy right about now.” Here is a blog post about him (Brian), by another very interesting person: https://medium.com/@JoshuaKerievsky/example-guided-a-brief-history-f004ca19a96f Enjoy!

Read More »

What if one Team member does not agree with the process? (eg, to do “scrum”)

For our work, we have two related ideas.  The Team and the team’s process.  (Yes, there are many other ideas, principles, values too.) The Team Most people, I think, like working on a pretty good team.  Often quite a lot. Of course, not every team is good. Some people need an adjustment time. See the […]

Read More »

Is Velocity Evil? (No.)

In a webinar today, someone said that Velocity is evil if equated with productivity.  I disagree.  And partly agree.   First some explanations (short, maybe too short for some): The Velocity of a sprint is the number of story points that the team “earned” (completed) that sprint. It’s the way we score in the game […]

Read More »

What is Scrum? – by Ken Schwaber

Here is a short paper by Ken Schwaber: whatIsScrum Willem-Jan Ageling (here) says that the paper is from 2003.  So, about 10 years after Scrum was invented. Schwaber and Sutherland (and others) had written many papers by then.  And the Scrum Guide (of 2009) had not yet been written. It is interesting to see the […]

Read More »

Fixing Agile Transformations – 1

Wow, what a big topic! Jon Jorgensen put up a post on LinkedIn.  Here: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6978462442318135297/ (Jon has lots of good posts. Recommended.) I have not asked Jon exactly what he meant by his question.  I suspect a bit of mid-western sarcasm is involved. Here is my reaction, which is meant to be of some partial […]

Read More »

Commonalities and Differences

What is unavoidable — in Teams we work with people. And we work also with people outside the Team.  But let’s discuss that topic in another post. The next obvious thing to say is that people are complicated, each person by herself or himself, and in a Team of seven then, we get a lot […]

Read More »

Agile Carolinas: Requirements with Agile – How to become better

Agile Carolinas meeting: May 17, 2022 – at 5:30 pm.  IN-PERSON. We may try to also broadcast via Zoom.  ie, Hybrid.  (We need someone to help with that.) [Links to be added]   *** Unclear requirements are always a problem.  Always hard in a way. So, let’s discuss how we are doing “requirements” in an […]

Read More »