Agile Succeeds Three Times More Often Than Waterfall

by Mike Cohn, 13 February 2012 | The Agile Blogosphere

Agile projects are successful three times more often than non-agile projects, according to the 2011 CHAOS Manifesto from the Standish Group. The report goes so far as to say, “The agile process is the universal remedy for software development project failure. Software applications developed through the agile process have three times the success rate of the traditional waterfall method and a much...
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Estimating and Planning Are Necessary for Maximizing Delivered Value

by Mike Cohn, 6 February 2012
The Agile Blogosphere

Because I’m so interested in estimating and planning, I always take notice when I see a new blog post or news group posting claiming, “Estimating is waste! Don’t do...
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Rotating the ScrumMaster Role

by Mike Cohn, 27 January 2012
The Agile Blogosphere

Some teams that struggle with choosing the best ScrumMaster decide that an appropriate strategy is to rotate the role among all team members. I don’t advocate this, as I don’t think...
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Please Help Me List the Problems with Using Agile or Scrum

by Mike Cohn, 3 January 2012
The Agile Blogosphere

I’m trying to create a list of the biggest, most common, or hardest to overcome problems that a team might face when adopting Scrum or agile. I could really use your help by contributing...
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Recommendations not Rules

by Mike Cohn, 2 January 2012
The Agile Blogosphere

I seem to be encountering more and more people who want to codify agile into a set of rules. I’ve seen this lately in authors of books, blogs or PDFs about agile or Scrum that...
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New Planning Poker Card Design

by Mike Cohn, 4 December 2011
The Agile Blogosphere

I’ve wanted to update the design of our Planning Poker cards for quite awhile, and we finally got the chance. The new cards feature an all-new back design to go along with the...
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In Defense of Large Numbers

by Mike Cohn, 28 November 2011
The Agile Blogosphere

People are often surprised that I allow (or even encourage) people to estimate with story points as large as 20, 40, and 100. We include these values in the decks of Planning Poker...
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Stories, Epics and Themes

by Mike Cohn, 24 October 2011
The Agile Blogosphere

I’ve been getting more and more emails lately from people confused about the difference between “user story”, “epic” and “theme.” So I thought...
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Simulating a Project by Resampling Velocity

by Mike Cohn, 25 September 2011
Agile Estimating

I normally write about a new technique only after I’ve used it for a couple of years and have found it successful in a couple of different contexts. In this post I want to share something...
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Seeing How Well a Team’s Story Points Align from One to Eight

by Mike Cohn, 19 September 2011
Agile Estimating

The topic of how well a team estimates two point stories relative to one point stories (and so on) has come up in a couple of comments and replies on this blog recently, so let’s...
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Estimating a Full Backlog Based on a Sample of It

by Mike Cohn, 16 September 2011
Agile Estimating

I want to address a question I was sent recently and that I get asked about once a month. The question has to do with how we estimate how many hours it will take to deliver a given...
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Protecting the Team Cuts Both Ways

by Mike Cohn, 26 July 2011
Agile Teams

It is a generally accepted Scrum dictum that one of the ScrumMaster’s duties is to protect the team. The usual example is that the ScrumMaster must protect the team from an overly...
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A Sample Format for a Spreadsheet-Based Product Backlog

I want to show a real easy way to put user stories in a spreadsheet-based product backlog. I wrote this after seeing someone tweet a screen capture of a product backlog I made 9 years...
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