Humanizing Work 2013 Conference Recap
Last month’s Humanizing Work Conference was organized around one big hypothesis: that it was possible to do to a conference what we’d done to our…
Category: Uncategorized
Focusing on the Right Things in Your Daily Scrum
“Yesterday, I was in Sprint Planning…” I hear it once, and I’m suspicious. By the time the third team member says this, it’s clear the…
Agile Homeschool
My wife and I have been homeschooling our 3 boys since our oldest, who turns 13 tomorrow, started kindergarten. From the beginning, we’ve tried to…
Change Happens—So Make it Cheaper
Change on software projects is expensive; it leads to wasteful rework. Change is risk. We can deal with risk one of two ways. We can…
Splitting Stories in Spanish (or, Como Dividir una Historia de Usuario)
Thanks to Joserra Díaz for the translation (with feedback from Matin Alaimo and Alan Cyment).
Story Splitting in Russian (or, Как Разделять Истории Пользователей)
Thanks to Alexander Lutsaevsky for the translation.
Splitting Stories in French (or, Comment découper un récit utilisateur)
Thanks to Jean-Jacques Lévesque, my “How to Split a User Story” poster is now available in French.
Functional Managers in Agile
As an organization transforms to an agile way of working, functional managers (e.g. a dev manager or a test manager) can feel lost. Many of…
Splitting Stories in German (or, User Stories Aufteilen)
Thanks to translation from Kai Simons, my “How to Split a User Story” flowchart is now available in German.
New Story Splitting Resource
More than two years after I originally published it, “Patterns for Splitting User Stories” remains one of the most visited posts on my blog. Splitting…
Coaching Surgeons, Cyclists, and Software Teams
Atul Gawande is a surgeon and author who has written some excellent books and New Yorker articles reflecting on the state of modern medicine. Recently,…
With apologies to Bill Engvall, ScrumMasters, here’s your sign!
Have you ever had one of those days when you wondered if your ScrumMaster was on crack? Or maybe you’re the ScrumMaster and the you…
Cucumber Tip: IRB From Inside a Step Definition
Most Ruby programmers know about Ruby’s interactive console, IRB. (If you don’t, stop right here, open up a command window and run irb. Type some…
Building a Useful Task Board
The task board is a simple, yet powerful, tool for Scrum teams. As a coach, I can tell a lot about a team just by…
Cucumber Tip: Key-Value Tables
You may not realize this: Tables in Cucumber steps don’t have to have a header row. Sometimes it can work really well to use a…
The Future of Cucumber on .NET
Beginning just over two years ago, I worked with some great developers to create Cuke4Nuke as a way to bring Cucumber to .NET. Shortly after…
Why Longer Sprints Probably Won’t Help
As a coach, I’m frequently told, “Our sprint length is too short. We want to change it from X to Y weeks.” The time box—the…
Cucumber Regular Expressions Cheat Sheet
Regular expressions are a big part of what makes Cucumber tests both expressive in English and DRY on the automation side. To make the most…
Getting Started with Ruby, Cucumber, and Capybara on Windows
The Ruby version of Cucumber isn’t just for Rails developers. If you have a .NET or Java web or service app, Ruby can be a…
Another Story Splitting Pattern (Maybe)
User stories are typically written using a template like, “As a <role>, I want to <action> so that <value>.” My other story splitting patterns focus…