As Jeff Sutherland finished describing how important the burndown chart had been in the creation of Scrum, I started feeling guilty for my previous attacks [on burndowns, not on Jeff]. But then I started thinking of examples of how burndowns can easily fail to reflect reality. Even if we ignore… Read More »Burndown versus CFD
Today, Emily Webber and I launched Agile on the Bench. Our idea was simple: people gather around a bench and listen to short talks on agile. In the spirit of Speaker’s Corner, we wanted to create a cheap, fun, and no-tech platform for people to share ideas, raise questions and… Read More »Agile on the Bench
What is Little’s Law? If you have a stable system (e.g. one-in-one-out), then the average number of customers you have within that system is equal to the average rate of customer arrivals multiplied by the average time a customer spends in the system. That was the law proposed by John… Read More »Little’s Law
My last post: Testing is an activity, not a role, prompted a few comments on Twitter from my friends in the testing community. Most people didn’t think the post went far enough in explaining that although testing may indeed be an activity, it’s probably more than one activity, and that different activities… Read More »Software Development is a Team Sport
How effective are your daily stand-ups? Do you think you could spot bad traits if they happened? Could you spot them in others’ meetings? Some of you will remember that, at this year’s Scrum Alliance retreat, a bunch of us identified that many Scrum Masters don’t have a support network… Read More »New movie: “Bad stand-up”
I heard Mike Burrows talk about STATIK at the Kanban Leadership Retreat in June. STATIK is an acronym for Systems Thinking Approach To Introducing Kanban, a good title for the process of bringing the following steps into play: Understand sources of dissatisfaction Analyze demand and capability Model the knowledge discovery… Read More »STATIK
I have worked in lots of organisations where ‘management’ has tried to measure and monitor development teams with the aim of seeing how the teams are performing and then using that information to drive through improvements in performance. This desire to measure and control things can often have some unintended… Read More »The Cobra Effect
In traditional software development environments, testing may have been something that was outsourced. One group of people wrote the code and handed it off to a different team for testing. More recently, as the Principles of Agile were created and the Scrum framework in particular was popularised, cross functional teams… Read More »Testing is an activity, not a role
An example of a ‘cargo cult’ is found on the island of Tannu, east of Australia. In WWII, the US military brought a wealth of equipment and supplies to the small island. Cargo (such as fridges, medicines, clothing, weapons) had never been seen by the islanders before and many of… Read More »Cargo cults and logical fallacies
Is your business fit for purpose? What does that actually mean? And how does it relate to what we do? It’s a topic that is regularly referred to in groups that deal with change. It’s a particular favourite of David J. Anderson’s, who I’ve heard mention it a number of… Read More »Fitness for Purpose
Contact us today to start building your tailor-made plan so that you can successfully implement better agile ways of working.
© 2013-2024 Scrum and Kanban Limited. All Rights Reserved
Website Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Anti-Bribery Policy | Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking Statement | Environmental Policy