How’s your Scrum?

Are you doing Scrum, or are you doing Scrum-But? Many teams use the Nokia Test to evaluate their Scrumness. Bas Vodde presented the original Nokia Test in 2006; he used it as a simple way to evaluate the Agileness of development teams at Nokia. In 2007, Jeff Sutherland adapted the Nokia Test to Scrum. Ken Schwaber recently developed a more comprehensive Scrum assessment. [...]

By |2023-04-22T21:13:03-04:00December 17th, 2009|Uncategorized|Comments Off on How’s your Scrum?

Why can’t we be as good as Nokia?

Nokia has a great reputation in the Agile community.  Why can't we be as good as Nokia?  It turns out we can.  Here's my presentation from the Nokia Agile Community Autumn Meet 2010 conference in Helsinki, held on December 7.  Use the Nokia Test, a simple value stream map, and Theory of Constraints, and you can transform your dev team from [...]

By |2023-04-22T21:13:04-04:00December 9th, 2009|Uncategorized|Comments Off on Why can’t we be as good as Nokia?

Ken Schwaber’s Flacid Scrum

Ken Schwaber presented "Flacid Scrum--A New Pandemic?" last night at the Agile Bazaar. Ken's talk was a one hour overview of Scrum, with the point that if it's ScrumBut, then it's not Scrum. Scrum works because it exposes organizational impediments to success, not despite exposing impediments. Don't adapt Scrum to your organization's dysfunctions; correct them!

By |2023-04-22T21:13:05-04:00June 19th, 2009|Uncategorized|Comments Off on Ken Schwaber’s Flacid Scrum

Learning Agile via Agile Games

Michael de la Maza presented "Learning Agile via Agile Games" at Wednesday night's Agile Boston meeting. We played some fun games that would have been impossible to win if they weren't fun and if we didn't communicate with each other face to face. One of the games was a brief Planning Poker exercise. Michael's point was that one of [...]

By |2023-04-22T21:13:05-04:00May 29th, 2009|Uncategorized|Comments Off on Learning Agile via Agile Games

Acceptance criteria template

When is it Done? How do you know? Does your Product Owner agree? Does your customer agree? When we estimate user story size and sprint task effort, we ask ourselves how we will know when a task or a story is done. We make a list of doneness tests, and we call them acceptance criteria. In the spirit of Mike Cohn's user story template, we use [...]

By |2023-04-22T21:13:06-04:00May 25th, 2009|Uncategorized|Comments Off on Acceptance criteria template

Scrum reference card

Michael James of Danube recently published the Scrum cheat sheet on Refcardz. Download it, read it, and live it--it's good!

By |2023-04-22T21:13:06-04:00May 4th, 2009|Uncategorized|Comments Off on Scrum reference card

Agile for mobile

Agile for mobile These are my notes from a presentation I gave Saturday at MobiCamp Boston 2. The pitch ... or maybe it's in the product development, too Software engineering is where you spend most of your effort, time, and money when you build your mobile app Scrum can help control your software engineering effort/time/expense [...]

By |2023-04-22T21:13:07-04:00March 25th, 2009|Uncategorized|Comments Off on Agile for mobile

Mobile success factors: how to succeed, how to fail

These are my notes from a presentation I gave Saturday at MobiCamp Boston 2. The pitch You are building a mobile app You want it to be successful How do you do that? Is there something in product development that you can control? Of course, but we all know how to build a great app, so [...]

By |2023-04-22T21:13:08-04:00March 24th, 2009|Uncategorized|Comments Off on Mobile success factors: how to succeed, how to fail

Manage by commitment + manage by process == manage by Scrum

Donald Sull recently discussed three styles of management, with management by commitments as the winner, and management by process the runner up. I agree: these are key aspects of Scrum, and two of the reasons Scrum works. Sull's first style management is managing by power hierarchy. This is the old command-and-control style of management. This [...]

By |2023-04-22T21:13:09-04:00March 16th, 2009|Uncategorized|Comments Off on Manage by commitment + manage by process == manage by Scrum

Is It Done?

The question is a cliche among agile teams: what does Done mean? I recently heard a number of responses from two teams: It works so well we are willing to give it to the customer. I like this definition. These team members are proud of their work and are focused on pleasing the customer. The pilot has landed the airplane [...]

By |2023-04-22T21:13:09-04:00March 9th, 2009|Uncategorized|Comments Off on Is It Done?

Why there should be a “release backlog”

Mike Cohn writes that there should not be a release backlog. He has impeccable timing, given my recent post defining the term Release Backlog . I disagree with Mike. Release Backlog is a useful tool for my teams. I won't argue with Mike point by point because Mike's context is different from mine. He suggests that the context of [...]

By |2023-04-22T21:13:10-04:00February 16th, 2009|Uncategorized|Comments Off on Why there should be a “release backlog”

Release backlog

Two team members asked, "What does 'release backlog' mean?" I drew this Venn diagram, and they both understood: Everything: The universe contains all possible product requirements. Most of them will not be included in our product. Product backlog: The product backlog contains the subset of all possible product requirements that we agree could be included in our [...]

By |2023-04-22T21:13:11-04:00February 9th, 2009|Uncategorized|Comments Off on Release backlog

Certified ScrumMaster

I spent two days last week at Jeff Sutherland's Certified ScrumMaster class. Jeff is one of the creators of Scrum. He is an excellent teacher with high caliber experience, not just applying Scrum, but applying Scrum well. I highly recommend Jeff's class to everyone interested in doing software development well.

By |2023-04-22T21:13:12-04:00January 26th, 2009|Uncategorized|Comments Off on Certified ScrumMaster
Go to Top