Archives

Self-organization of the Team

We have this idea in Agile, that the Team should self-organize.  This is an important idea. And, more, an important action of the Team. In Agile, self-organization is contrasted with command-and-control. We think self-organization is an important thing to study, both in general and in your Team. It seems simple, but like almost anything, to […]

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Release Planning: Risks, Dependencies, Learning, MMFS and Other

[This is a continuation of a series on Release Planning that starts here.] Now we come to the point of (re)ordering the Product Backlog (PB). Note: After calculating the R Factor, I like to order the PB by R.  Not that I would expect the Team to do the work in that order, but to […]

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Release Planning: Effort (2)

[This is a continuation of a series on Release Planning that starts here.] Now we come to the point of describing Planning Poker. This has been done before; we will be brief.  It is described at greater length many other places. *** Some basic characteristics: * We find the 5 best experts (or 4-7 people) […]

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Release Planning: Vision

[This is one in a series on Release Planning.  The series starts here.] This is the first of several posts on my suggestions for the details of doing better agile Release Planning. The first step is Vision.  We define the vision, and make sure that all the right people see the same vision and “agree […]

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Why call it “BV Engineering?”

A man I greatly respect wrote to ask why I call it “BV Engineering.”  There are many engineering disciplines, he noted, but is there a degree in “business value engineering”? I said I thought an MBA was the degree for this. Not another regular engineering degree,  but I agree with him that for some the […]

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Agile & Religion – 1

I heard recently someone comment: “Well, watch out for those guys who get too religious about Agile. We don’t want that around here.” This general topic gets talked about in the Agile community a lot, and, I think, often ineffectively. But I think it is a difficult topic. It is hard to explain the issues […]

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Scrum and Release Planning

I went to the Agile Ottawa group last night. Mostly I very much enjoyed the meeting — a lot of smart people, a lot of good discussions, but… A Sad Tale A gentleman there, a serious business guy, new to Scrum, said something like this: “It seems to me that Scrum has no up-front planning, […]

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Additional ideas: adopting lean-agile

This topic (adopting Lean-Agile) is being discussed here and many places. I think I will be discussing it with a senior executive in Canada on Monday, so, very pertinent for me and likely many others. A lot of smart people in that discussion (I know some of them personally). A number of great ideas were […]

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How to adopt agile?

In the Agile Alliance LinkedIn group discussions [around March 2011], there was a discussion about “How to adopt Agile in my organization?” by Mark Lummus. This is a complex topic, with many things to say. Here is most of my first post (in that group) about this. There are many other things I might have […]

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What we do…

Here is an interesting post by Daniel Glyde, about what his team does at www.wiggle.co.uk. Scrum, and….    

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