- Agile Leadership Development
- Coaching
- Facilitation
- Leadership
- Practices
- Principles
- Product Owner
- Scaling
- ScrumMaster
New to Agile? Use a Rules of Engagement document.
How do we work together? Seems like a simple question, right? How wrong you could be! For an agile team, working together is vitally important, but it is also the hardest thing to accomplish. Why? Because we
Agile anti-pattern: Going to longer iterations
This is another common theme among teams just starting with agile. It usually goes something like this:
- The team has an unsuccessful iteration.
- They determine all the unfinished work is testing.
- During the retrospective they resolve to give more help to the testers so they can finish in time.
- The next iteration is also
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 of people say the simplest thing that works is what should be implemented. I agree with that wholeheartedly and even have a blog entry on how
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. The reason given for this was “to allow QA to test what we created during the iteration.” I’m sorry, but I have to be blunt here – this isn’t agile!
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 traditional development process companies use it as an argument for longer release cycles saying something like “It takes 8 weeks
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 that went something like this:
Scrum Master: OK everyone, it is time for our status report. Let’s start with Joe.
Joe (delivered in a boring monotone voice): Yesterday I
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 from one iteration
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 understand how to emerge and meet architectural requirements just in time for the team to be able to proceed. They get