Category Archives: Key problems

2014 State of Agile Survey

Here are the survey results from Version One on the state of Agile. A pretty good job, I think. Many interesting observations in the survey. Let me highlight one. Under “Barriers to Further Agile Adoption,” the top three answers were: 44% ability to change organizational culture 35% not enough personnel with the necessary Agile experience […]

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Multitasking

I think the key goal of Scrum is to help the team maximize the Business Value from the team to the customers. Another subsidiary goal is to enable the team to focus. Focus is more or less the opposite of multitasking. Perhaps even more to the point, multitasking is one of the great destroyers of […]

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Teams that Finish Early Accelerate Faster

Jeff Sutherland has recommended this recent article: “Teams that Finish Early Accelerate Faster.” Here it is: teamsthatfinishearlyacceleratefaster What’s the deal? Well, many of us are seeing ‘scrum’ that is not … not achieving the results we would like to see.  I say it this way: we want everyone to achieve significantly better results.  Jeff Sutherland talks […]

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Why the Yogi Berra jokes? Why the music? Why all the questions and sarcasm in class?

I want to explain the techniques I use in the CSM class, or at least something about them. First, some people really like these techniques, and want to know more. Second, sadly, a few people find the techniques annoying, especially the first day.  In general this is a small percentage of people, but in some […]

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The Truth: Scrum is Not Easy!

May I tell the truth? I am a trainer, and people come to my courses.  And often they want an easy answer.  A magic answer that is not disturbing, or bothersome, but is in every way good, easy, friendly and just better. In other words, they come to change, but they don’t want to change.  […]

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“It’s not too far, it just seems like it is.” (Yogi Berra)

I wanted to talk quickly about 4 classic mistakes or issues.  We all must deal with these. Before starting, I wanted to mention this famous and important quote: “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.” (Yogi Berra)  I forgot to mention this one in the last class, and […]

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Velocity: What if a story is partially completed in one sprint?

Question: If you had a user story (Story X) with four Story Points at the start of the Sprint, which was not completed by the end of the Sprint but the majority of the work was done (e.g., just two small bugs remained), would you recalculate the Story Points when adding this into the next Sprint […]

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Definition of Ready

Gabriel asked: Hi Joe, Can you recommend few good sources for “Definition of Ready” ? Answer:  I like Jeff Sutherland’s ideas.  In general, but also in this area. Did you see this? http://scrum.jeffsutherland.com/2009/07/ready-dynamic-model-of-scrum.html It includes an article.  Read that. As he taught me, the DOR (or ‘ready, ready criteria’) is flexible team by team.  Each […]

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Question: More on Agile Contracts

Gabriel asks: Can you suggest a few relevant papers on Agile contracts? I am interested in both the ad-hoc, non-commercial agreements, to maximize, based on Pareto law naive application, the output of PO-development team through collaboration, and the commercial agreements that best support such an objective. I read this: http://www.agilecontracts.org/agile_contracts_primer.pdf but I would like to […]

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Joe’s real agile contract

Adela asks: “Please send me some information [on] the details contracts shall contain [for] those projects where the methodology is Agile.” To talk more clearly, let’s imagine a situation.  Imagine you are a ‘development firm’, ie, in response to external client needs, you develop custom software. Imagine that the client contacts your firm. He knows […]

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