The Rules of Scrum: Every Sprint includes Sprint Retrospective for the team to inspect and adapt

The last part of the Sprint is the Sprint Retrospective.  This meeting is a private meeting for the members of the Scrum Team (including the ScrumMaster and Product Owner).  In this meeting, the Team Members discuss how they did their work during the past Sprint and come up with ways to improve their work in the next Sprint.  Scrum does not define any particular techniques to use during the Retrospective...
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The Rules of Scrum: Every Sprint is Four Weeks or Less in Duration

The length of a Sprint determines how quickly a Scrum Team can “inspect and adapt” to changing circumstances and learning.  Scrum, as a tool for product development, sets...
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Important Words about Scrum and Tools

Ken Schwaber, the founder of Scrum, has a blog.  In it, someone mentioned that Scrum is changing.  Ken responded: If you change the Scrum framework you just simply aren’t using...
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Seven Options for Handling Interruptions in Scrum and Other Agile Methods

Almost three years ago we wrote a brief article about interruptions.  In that article, we described four methods of dealing with interruptions.  I would like to expand on those four...
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24 Common Scrum Pitfalls Summarized

Scrum is the most popular agile method… if you count all of the teams doing “Scrum Butt”.  Doing Scrum really well is much harder and much rarer.  Here is a list of 24 common...
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Agile Transformation and the Chasm

In his book “Crossing the Chasm“, Geoffrey Moore describes the difficulty of creating a popular new product due to a conceptual “chasm” between the first people who adopt a...
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What is Scrum good for?

I have worked with a lot of people, teams and organizations over the last 8 years helping them to adopt Scrum and I have seen some interesting patterns about where Scrum works well...
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Estimation – Bad Advice

Here’s a fun article on PMI.org.  By omission, it gives some very bad advice about estimation.  What is it missing?  Asking the people who are going to do the work!!!  Any estimation...
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Teams, People and “Resources” – The Culture of Agility

In an Agile culture, it is considered rude to refer to people as “resources”. People are not fungible – you cannot just take any old developer and plug them into any old project....
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The Agile Planning Onion is Wrong

The concept is simple: there are six levels of planning in an organization, often represented as layers of a metaphorical onion. In the agile planning onion, strategy is the outermost...
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Five Tips for Distributed Agile Teams

Actually, this is six tips because my first tip is really about deciding to use distributed teams… Some in-house studies that I have been privy to have shown 2-1 or 3-1 productivity...
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Excellent Selection of Agile Requirements and Testing Practices

I am currently a reviewer of proposals in the “Agile Boot Camp” stage of the Agile 2011 conference.  In doing these reviews, I have come across the work of Jennitta Andrea....
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Calculating a Budget for an Agile Project in Six Easy Steps

A former student of mine called the other day.  He asked a good question: how do you calculate the budget for a project if you are using an agile approach to delivery.  Here is the...
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