Category Archives: Better Agile

Release Planning: Business Value

[For those who have not been reading before, this is a continuation of a series that starts here.] Now we move on to Business Value in Release Planning. As Yogi Berra said: “You have to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.” If you are in […]

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The Team and Introverts

I have several friends who are introverts.  And, as I get older, I recognize my own introvert side. And I appreciate it more, and accept it more. (The MBTI says I am an extrovert.)  It is to one introvert friend that I dedicate this post, a friend who has given me so many insights into […]

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Release Planning: Product Backlog

[This post is one in a series on Release Planning, which starts here.] After we complete the Vision, we must develop the Product Backlog. There are two parts to this. First, we must define the Roles to use in the User Stories. Second, we must write User Stories.  I call this second part a User […]

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Public Impediment List – Again

I wrote the following post to a Scrum group. Perhaps you will find it interesting. It is lightly edited. And it is in response to another person’s post. *** Let’s talk about the impediment list more. Along the way I will mention some of the problems I see in real life. I find that most […]

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What cocktail parties teach us

The title above is the title of an article today in the Wall Street Journal.  The subhead is: “Brain Is Wired to Focus on Just One Thing; Which Tasks Are Easier to Combine” It’s all about how we humans are built to focus. Multitasking is, well, inhuman.  A few monkeys can pretend to multitask, but […]

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Refresher Attendees: new program

We have just started a new program:  having prior attendees of my courses attend the same course again.  Almost for free.  Well, not exactly free.  You have to pay a much-reduced fee. People need this. they have forgotten they have mis-remembered they have not used certain skills or knowledge they have seen and grown accustomed […]

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Release Planning: Vision

[This is one in a series on Release Planning.  The series starts here.] This is the first of several posts on my suggestions for the details of doing better agile Release Planning. The first step is Vision.  We define the vision, and make sure that all the right people see the same vision and “agree […]

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Dr. Royce and Waterfall

In 1970, Dr. Winston Royce wrote the paper that defined Waterfall.  It was probably beig done by others at the time, but the paper is considered definitive. Here is the paper: http://agileconsortium.pbworks.com/w/page/52184647/Royce%20Defining%20Waterfall He identified 5 things that must be added to reduce most of the risks of doing waterfall.  And I will comment on how Scrum […]

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2011 State of Agile Survey

Below is the 2011 Survey by Version One.  The state of agile.  One might like yet better participants in the survey, but still I think it is generally indicative of the main trends, because many participated. http://agileconsortium.pbworks.com/w/page/51511217/2011%20State%20of%20Agile%20Survey  Some key points to me: * We have a long way to go * Too many people “rolling […]

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We must have working software at the end of the Sprint!

This is a common failing (we don’t have working product or working software at the end of the sprint).  Jeff Sutherland has said this is the biggest problem in the Scrum community — too many teams don’t have working software at the end of every Sprint. If we include cases where 1 or more PBIs […]

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