Category Archives: Better Agile

Joe’s Unofficial Scrum Checklist

Henrik Kniberg did a Scrum Checklist a while ago. Occasionally students at courses ask me for a similar thing. One always wonders: what are the most important questions to ask? What are the most important things to consider? Nothing that is somewhat short can address all the issues one finds in the real world, with […]

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Release Planning with Business Stakeholders

I just posted in the Yahoo group Agile Business the following: The past 3 (business) days I worked with a team in Atlanta to do release planning with the Business Stakeholders.  The business stakeholders were external customers. I was extremely impressed with the results. I strongly recommend it. Situation: * 15 people (6 pigs, 3 […]

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Better Retrospectives

In Scrum (and in life), we have periodic retrospectives.  In Scrum, we have a time-boxed Retrospective meeting once each sprint. Why? The main reason is to be more productive without working any harder.  Put another way: mainly to remove impediments. I hear about far too many Retrospectives where we have a lot of fun bitching […]

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The Biggest Problem

Jeff Sutherland believes that the biggest problem with Scrum teams, the most frequently encountered problem, is that the Team does not have working product at the end of the Sprint. This is fundamental to Scrum.  And, in my view, fundamental to being successful. Why is this so important? First, working product enables the empirical process; it […]

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The Michael Phelps Attitude

Whatever we do, what is our attitude?  In work or in much of the rest of life, I think our attitude should be some interesting combination of humble and aggressive. My business is lean-agile-scrum.  Are we ever finished learning Scrum (the simplest of the three)? My answer: No. Why?  I started talking about the Michael […]

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Leaning in, Leaning back

Some of you may know of my dance theory of human relationships.  It is a simple theory, and like many simple things, true at least some of the time. It says that if you want someone to come closer, you must move backwards, as most any pair dancer will tell you.  That of course assumes […]

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The Team and introverts

Thomas Edison, an introvert. I love introverts.  Some of my best friends are introverts. First, it may help to define the terms.  Introverts gain energy with quiet time; extroverts gain energy being with people.  See, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraversion_and_introversion   To me, neither term is in favor or out of favor. I have been talking a lot […]

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Why Release Planning?

I led a discussion at the Ottawa Agile and Scrum groups last week. I asked the group to come up with some reasons to do Release Planning.  In essence, they represent the meta ‘purposes’ of release planning.  Purposes that one’s approach to Release Planning should try to optimize. The group came up with many good […]

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Scrum Hates Technical Debt!

This is my phrase: Scrum hates Technical Debt!  Ken Schwaber talks about Flaccid Scrum.  (Not my favorite metaphor.)  Jeff Sutherland talks about ScrumButt and the Nokia Test.  (I like this.)  Uncle Bob Martin talks about “the land that Scrum forgot.” The problem is bigger than my phrase implies.  What is the problem?  People are doing […]

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Getting Better

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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