New to agile? Do the simplest thing that works – THEN STOP!
As an agile trainer and coach I often see new teams struggle with a simple question: “How much to do on a user story?” A lot…
Category: Agile Ideas
Agile antipattern: Code freezes during each iteration
Over the past 18 months I’ve encountered a number of teams where it is standard practice to have a code freeze late in the iteration. …
Agile is like… golfing?
Well, if agile could be like cooking and a fishing trip could be agile it only made sense that another of my hobbies would be agile in…
Agile Ponderings: Certification – useful or not?
I’ve had to do a lot of thinking about certification recently. Why? Because I needed to decide if I should apply to become a Certified…
New to agile? Get focused with a vision
Bear with me on this blog entry. It takes a bit of setup until I get to the main point. Lately I’ve been doing a…
Agile antipattern: Using manual tests
In an agile environment manual testing is fine – except for when it isn’t! In particular, everyone recognizes manual regression testing takes time. When using a…
New to agile? Tips for better daily stand-ups
As an agile coach I have attended a lot of daily stand-up meetings. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been in a meeting…
Agile antipattern: Extending an iteration
I had a previous blog post about stopping an iteration and how it was a really bad idea. Another blog post was about moving work…
Agile Architecture – It is NOT an Oxymoron!
Many companies adopting agile have a hard time with the architecture and design of their large systems. They like the concept of agile, but can’t…
Ten Ways to Improve Your Planning Poker Results
People who promote the use of Planning Poker understand some of the main reasons why it is successful. People like Mike Cohn have been very instrumental…
New to agile? Don’t settle for mediocrity
James Shore recently changed the entire focus of his company. This blog entry gives his reasons why. The blog post really struck a chord with…
New to agile? Tools for distributed agile
I’ve been working the past several weeks with some highly distributed teams. Each team requires a way to track their project effectively (when you have…
Never start a sentence “We can’t be agile because…”
I recently started filling out a form which included a question regarding the training I’ve done. As I filled it out I realized that in…
Agile Pondering: Should an iteration ever be stopped?
It is accepted in the agile world that if an iteration or sprint is going extremely badly then it can be stopped – rebooted I…
Agile antipattern: Moving work from one iteration to the next
All agile teams start at something less than the completely proficient level. Nearly all of those teams do not successfully complete their very first iteration. …
Never have a PMP on an agile team
Now that I have your attention, let me be VERY clear I don’t believe the title of this post. However, many people do believe it, and…
New to Agile? Beware of the elephant in the room!
Like many other agile consultants I am often asked how agile adoptions could fail. This question has a myriad of answers. A search on Google…
Being agile is to releasing products, like fishing is to catching fish
I recently read this blog post from Chris Sterling and while funny, it made me wonder about the similarities between fishing and agile development. Since…
Agile antipattern: But the development lead said it would take way less time than that
I’d be rich if I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard this, or something very similar to it, in the past 30 years! Alright,…
Agile Antipattern: Everything is priority 1
I was just working on some Powerpoint slides for our Agile Product Management Boot Camp coming up on March 9 and 10 and I realized I should…