Archives

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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Freedom

It is July 4th today.  It is a great day to remember Freedom. As I have said elsewhere, to my way of looking at the world, there is one word, love, that is greater than freedom.  But perhaps only that one. [Side comment: God is love. So, we could say that God too is greater […]

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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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Getting personal

One of the things I like most about Scrum is that it makes people, well, personal. It allows people to be themselves. One of the best suggestions I ever heard for living was: Love your neighbor as yourself. (Might I be a touch sarcastic? Still, I also mean the message quite straightforwardly.) Of course, as […]

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Business Value is a dream

There is a famous Taoist story about a person dreaming that he is a butterfly and awakens and can’t decide: Am I person who dreamt I was a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming I am now a person? This is not the kind of dream I meant, when I used that word in […]

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CSM Course + Workshop: Why?

My colleague Catherine Louis got me, reluctantly at the time, to do a workshop at the end of a Certified ScrumMaster course, and then a client wanted the workshop with the course. (I have done many courses with workshops since then.) Now I am ‘hooked.’ As I have said before, the feedback from participants is […]

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Planning Poker – 1

At Agile-Carolinas, Laurie Williams gave a great presentation last night on how she does Planning Poker. (Suggestion: Google her. She is a professor at NC State, but that is just the start. She is very good.) Some of the discussion made me realize that there are many issues out there. So, here is how I […]

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Scrum & Control

One myth about Agile is, “Those Agile guys are out of control!” Of course, when one hears that, one must ask, what do you mean exactly? For example, Scrum does reveal that the team is involved in a creative process, a process of identifying what the customer wants and how it will be implemented and […]

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