If I had to keep only one team-wide meeting, it would be the retrospective. As well as being the catalyst for improvement, it is also the team’s opportunity to vent their frustration. In fact, raising issues is encouraged! Sure, the team has to go on to try to find solutions… Read More »Marmite Voting
In 2004 I went to a friend’s house for dinner and she served up what can only be described as “a disgusting mush”. This mush was apparently risotto. From that moment on, I was risotto’s biggest opponent. I fought against it whenever it appeared on menus. It was, in my… Read More »Kanban risotto
What makes a good user story? Is it as simple as just following the format advocated by many Scrum practitioners: As a <who>, I want <what> so that <why> For example: as a user I want to be able to add a product to a wishlist so that I can… Read More »What makes a good user story?
“There is something you should understand about the way I work. When you need me but do not want me, then I must stay. When you want me but no longer need me, then I have to go. It’s rather sad, really, but there it is.” ~ Nanny McPhee The… Read More »Self-organising teams: why today’s ScrumMaster is like Nanny McPhee
Until I started focusing on how much our team was working on at any one time (i.e. Work In Progress or “WIP”), as a result of us using Kanban, I didn’t realise just how much of our world is affected by poor flow and how Kanban could help us in… Read More »Why multi-tasking is for losers
“I’ve found iteration burndown charts to be extremely useful with iteration lengths of two weeks or more.” ~ Mike Cohn in Agile Estimating and Planning “I’ve found burndown charts frustrating, irritating and misleading.” ~ Me on a regular basis when they are discussed Mike Cohn goes on to say “An… Read More »Burning the burndown chart
In a recent LADG meeting, I realised why middle-management are sometimes reluctant to embrace agile: it’s because they have to accept an element of responsibility for the team’s output. With waterfall, the manager declares what he or she wants, then sits back and let’s the team commit to deliver the project by… Read More »Why old-school middle management prefers waterfall
“I don’t like the word commitment”, started Bob in a retrospective, “I don’t feel it’s fair that I’m promising the business the delivery of something that I have no control over [because there was work in the sprint that Bob would not be working on]. I’d prefer to use a… Read More »Commitment issues
Are you bored with your current stand-up? “Yesterday, I finished working on widget x, today I’ll start on widget y. I have no impediments.” Yawn! However functional it might be, using the same format can get boring. So I was very interested when I heard someone at the last London Agile… Read More »A back-to-front daily stand-up
I seem to be encountering more and more people who say stuff like “We were using Scrum but X didn’t work for us, so we stopped using it”. Let’s be clear about this: there is no single implementation of Scrum. Or Kanban. Or any other agile/lean framework. As Dan Brown… Read More »Scrum is a framework, not a directive
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