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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Team Commitment

Most Scrum teams estimate their top priority stories, select those stories that add up to their historical velocity for their sprint backlog. Some teams simplify this by merely counting...
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Predictable project or innovative project?

Mike Cottmeyer spoke at Agile Carolinas last night. And said many good and useful things. One thing he talked about is this: What kind of project do you have?  At one extreme, do you...
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Getting Teams to Deliver Predictably

queue size compared to utilization As recently as this week, I’ve been involved in conversations with customers about how we can help make their teams deliver more predictably....
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A purpose for Agile

In general, it is useful to do the most important things. Not the things we are most sure about.  Not the things that we can do well.  Not the things we can predict well (or better). But,...
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Start of a new chapter

Hi everyone, Yesterday was my last day at ThoughtWorks. ThoughtWorks is an amazing company with some fantastic people, so I feel very privileged to have worked for them and very...
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Thinking Together for Release Planning

I’ve been noodling on the phrase “Thinking Together”. Thinking Together is one aspect of the mindset that Product Owners need to embrace. I have been using this phrase...
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Agile Without Social Engineering

In 2006, Ivor Jacobson famously summarized, "Most important, agile is about social engineering."  And indeed one of the things that makes so many agilists so darned loveable is that...
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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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Estimation as Hypothesis

Experimentation is a powerful learning tool. When I was young, I performed scientific experiments by mixing chemicals together to see what they would do. I learned that most random...
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Happy Fibonacci Day!

Evolve or Die: Build an Agile Business

I love riding 100 mph on twisty, turning race tracks -- my favorite is Laguna Seca in Monterey, California. In racing, as in business, keeping the finish line in mind is important,...
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How do we estimate?

There have been some web posts and twitter comments lately that suggest some people have a very narrow view of what techniques constitute an estimate. I take a larger view, that any...
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