Category Archives: Better Agile

Velocity: Some preliminaries

It is important to know the Velocity of the team. What is velocity? Each team has a DOD (definition of done).  The Team has small stories at the top of the product backlog. When each small story, which has story points that estimate the relative effort, …when each story is “done-done” per the DOD, then […]

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Why not?

Rijon Erickson (sounds like “Ryan”) has an excellent post in LinkedIn. See here:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/rijonerickson/detail/recent-activity/ His (currently) latest posts asks for a DOR (definition of ready) and then a DOD (definition of done) (visually, he uses post-its).  The next post-it says “Simple (but) Not Easy”. To me, he is saying: We should be able to use […]

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Waterfall is done. Where is the debate now?

It is important to note that waterfall is over. Dr. Royce defined waterfall in 1970.  See his paper here. His son, Walker Royce, said that waterfall was over, and said we are on to iterative and incremental now.  He said this before we started calling it agile (before the Agile Manifesto was written).  See his […]

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Agile Transformation: What is it? Success? Metrics?

Last night at Agile Carolinas we had a discussion around the following topics. What is Agile Transformation? (really) What is success? (That is, what are the characteristics of a successful agile transformation.) What should the metrics be? We hope these notes are helpful to you. What is AgileTransformation? Below are the notes we took.  Many […]

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Our Fuller Picture of the Scrum Team

This is our basic picture of a single Scrum Team working on one release. (For example, this picture does not try to address ‘scaling’, if that were relevant.) The Basics Let’s start with the Product Owner, who is responsible for the quality of the Product Backlog. Then we mention the ScrumMaster, who is responsible for […]

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Agile Transformation – 2

I have already started talking, but want again to continue talking about an easy subject: Transforming a company to agile. Well, not so easy. But not as hard as some people think. ‘A journey of a thousand miles starts with one step.’ We are too easily discouraged by what seems a daunting task. We too […]

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Scrum – Observations from Sutherland’s book

Alisha Parry recently read Jeff Sutherland’s book, “Scrum: The art of doing twice work in half the time.” Here are some of her observations that she shared with a work colleague. 1. Bugs take 24x as long after you wait to work on them. We have seen this even on Kronos, as we have previously […]

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Info for SurveyMonkey Survey

Intro This is background information for the public survey. You can take our survey here (Survey Monkey). The key purpose of the survey is to serve you better. The needs of the larger group of our contacts are diverse. Some want courses, some need workshops. Some people are looking as individuals, and some are looking […]

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Real Scrum vs Easy Scrum

In the first course (almost always the CSM course), I have people wanting, in simple terms, one of two things. With little compromise between. One: Real Scrum. By this I mean everything in the Scrum Guide plus all the better patterns around that. Two: Easy Scrum (aka Half-baked Scrum) This is Scrum compromised quite a […]

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What is Agile Transformation?

Problem What is Agile Transformation? Abid Quereshi said this recently: ‘”Agile transformation” is another one of our made-up terms like Agile BA, Agile Tester, Agile PM and Agile Coach.’ By this he means, as he explained, that people use a term, but do not agree on its meaning, or that the meaning is so broad as to […]

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