A Remote Work Manifesto Signatory's $200/Month Reality Check The Confession I'm a signatory of the Manifesto for Online Collaboration. I've spent years evangelizing remote work, championing "people and relationships over technology and tools." I'm the CTO and co-founder of a 100% remote company. And now I pay $200/month to... not work remotely. Let me [...]
Have you ever wondered what truly drives the success of agile methodologies? Is it merely the technical benefits of speed, efficiency, and continuous improvement, or is there something more profound at play? As a CTO (I'm co-founder and CTO of Alli Connect) and a long-time practitioner of pair programming and continuous delivery, I've come [...]
Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash My students are my best teachers. In a recent High-Performance Team Building™ class, my students asked some great questions. I had to pause, ponder, learn something new, and get back to them after class. Here’s one of those great questions, along with my response. In the [...]
Before it was an app, “slack” was already a useful word. As a verb, it meant to take things easy and even be a bit lazy, but the noun hints at its more exciting possibilities: an empty piece of time or space where unknown things can occur. A bit of surplus time in your [...]
An interview with Richard Kasperowski on High-Performance Teams Stephen Harrison: Let me introduce Richard Kasperowski. Richard and I worked together a while back and have been friends ever since. Along the way, Richard has become a recognized expert in an interesting and relevant field. SH: Richard, welcome. Thanks for taking time to chat. Richard Kasperowski: [...]
Want to Know More About High-Performance Teams? Hi, friends! We did a webinar on high-performance teams a while back. In case you missed it, here are the video and slides: I wanted to make sure we answered everyone’s questions, so here we [...]
Cue the piano: If you don't want to see me... I did a full one-eighty, crazy Thinking ‘bout the way I was - from Dua Lipa’s “Don’t Start Now” I did a full one-eighty in my teaching, coaching, and consulting work. As recently as March, I advised clients that if they care about the product [...]
Joanne Stone and I recently had a great conversation about wicked problems. I love the word wicked. It’s a wonderfully positive word in my native New England vernacular. We use it to amplify or express the superlative of an idea: a wicked good movie, wicked awesome lobster dinner, a wicked nice day at the beach. [...]
Team Communication in Times of Crisis Once upon a time, a very long time ago—also known as “February 2020”—my personal and professional life consisted of being together and communicating with other people face to face. I gave talks at conferences, business coaching sessions in my clients’ offices, and professional training in their classrooms and in [...]
Photo by Helena Lopes on Unsplash Continuous Integration of People: a how-to guide Share emotional connection continuously. On a regular cadence: Do an emotion check-in with your teammates on a regular rhythm. Check-in with each other at least once every 24 hours. Try more frequent check-ins, like every half-day, or even every hour. [...]
Photo by Aziz Acharki on Unsplash Core Protocols for Remote Teams Check In frequently. Stay connected with each other emotionally. Explicitly Pass on an activity by typing or saying, “I pass.” Explicitly Check Out by typing or saying, “I’m checking out.” Manage your apps’ alerts and notifications appropriately. Ask for Help early and often. Use [...]
“I feel unsafe here!” Photo by Frank Busch on Unsplash Millennials get a bad rap for snowflake-like sensitivity and delicacy. It’s impossible to criticize anything a Millenial says or does – so the story goes. They’ll call you out on it and accuse you of creating an unsafe space. Millennial or not, sometimes [...]
Cuando era un bebé, viví con las monas durante tres meses. When I was a baby, I lived with the monkeys for three months. Photo by Tj Kolesnik on Unsplash My Spanish teacher tilted her head sideways like a puppy trying to understand the world through new eyes. My words were correct. My [...]
Want an easy tool to help you start building the best team of your life? That’s what the Team Transformation Canvas is: a practical worksheet to help you and your teammates discover the best in each other and put it into action. The canvas facilitates individual self-awareness of your current emotional state and desired [...]
The more things change, the more they stay the same. This includes the fundamentals of human nature: what motivates us, how we work together in groups, how we collaborate and communicate. The essential truths are unchanged — from the earliest human tribes just trying to survive, to the high-performance teams of today. The Core Protocols—derived [...]
Photo by You X Ventures on Unsplash Real-world cases and challenges—this is the exciting part of my work in high-performing teams. Real people have complicated and unpredictable lives and behaviors. This is where ideas get tested. For example, I recently got involved in a discussion about showing up at meetings. A team leader [...]
Photo by Thomas Drouault on Unsplash Like every good citizen, I was glad to do my civic duty. Juror service never comes at the most convenient of times, but it’s a responsibility that’s part of our social contract. When I got the call, I was happy to answer. The empaneling process was interesting, [...]
Original photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash When’s the last time you got good feedback? Not pat-on-the-back, puts-a-smile-on-your-face feedback. I mean effective feedback, feedback that helped you make a positive change in yourself. Whether from a manager responsible for reviewing your performance, a peer evaluation system, or a 360-degree exercise, giving and receiving [...]
Photo by Mimi Thian on Unsplash Hands up, who loves work meetings? Stupid question? You’re probably rolling your eyes, not raising your hand in affirmation. A slew of workplace memes and Dilbert cartoons mock the stereotype of compulsory, oppressive, time-wasting endurance sessions. Everyone hates meetings. There’s definitely a problem here. According to research [...]
One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child. - Carl Jung Learning to play the pututu in Peru [...]
Photo by Mimi Thian on Unsplash Conversation is a big part of human dynamics. How we talk, how we listen, how we communicate our intent: our interactions affect the emotional state of the people around us. During their initial work defining the Core Protocols, Jim and Michele McCarthy focused on work teams. They [...]
The end of the year is a great time to reflect on what the last twelve months have brought you and what you’ve learned or done—and to look ahead to the promise of the coming year. It’s a blank page on which you can write whatever future you desire for yourself. A blank page can [...]
What is love? Many great writers, artists, and philosophers have tried to define love over the years. They’ve all approached it from different perspectives and produced some interesting answers. I won’t compete with the romantics here. My interest is in workplace relationships and teams. After working for so long with the Core Protocols and observing teams that have high [...]
Photo by Henri Pham on Unsplash In last month’s blog, we looked at some of the reasons we find it difficult to ask that simple question, “will you help me?” I wanted to come back to Ask For Help again because despite being one of the simplest team behaviors to explain or describe, it seems [...]
Photo by Rémi Walle on Unsplash I get by with a little help from my team… Or I could have called this, Help, I need somebody, not just anybody There are lots of song lyrics and literature references about asking for help and looking for the support of others. And also about how [...]
I’ve been reflecting on some recent research into workplace motivation published in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (and reported in The New York Times) by Kathleen D. Vohs and Andrew C. Hafenbrack, which concluded that meditation was not a good thing for workplace productivity.This was surprising to me, given all the evidence about intrinsic motivation and [...]
Credit: jurvetson@Flickr Hi there! I'm so glad you visited! After you read this article, check out my courses, latest book, podcast, and other blog articles. Enjoy! Most people don’t want internal memos leaked and made public, but if you are the iconic figurehead of a ground-breaking innovator like Tesla, you probably expect to [...]
The Italian Job* My colleague mentioned, “By the way, I was thinking of Sicily, for the September conference.” Me: “Mmm… Where?” Colleague: “Southern island of Italy. Nice climate for the time of year, and I heard about a great new venue there. If you agree I’ll check it out and get back to you.” “Sure, [...]
Last month we had a look at the ‘Pass/unpass’ core protocol, used to indicate whether you are actively engaged with your teammates in an activity. Today let’s go a bit deeper into what being actively engaged when you’re part of a high-performing team means by examining two more protocols: Check In and Check Out. They are related, but [...]
Being part of a great team doesn’t mean showing up and being awesome about everything, every second of every day. Great teams aren’t formed from robotic supermen and women who never have conflicts, contradictions, or confusion – or who’ve never had a bad moment. They’re made up of everyday people who bring their whole selves [...]
My work with teams builds upon a body of knowledge developed across decades, applying the latest thinking to fundamental and well-tested theories of human behavior within groups. Repeatedly, and in many different settings and industries, the correlation plays out: High-performing teams require psychological safety. Psychological safety requires emotional intelligence at a team level. And understanding and applying [...]
Many manufacturing businesses follow a predictable rhythm of activities based on a production and distribution cycle. And Santa’s North Pole-based outfit is an excellent example. Everything builds to a single tight annual shipping window, and to ensure customer satisfaction, it’s vital that the entire team is performing at an optimal level — particularly during the run-up to [...]
Have you heard? Psychological safety is the key to high-performance teams at Google. Google is full of high-performers, both individuals and teams. Some teams at Google really stand out—they are the highest of the high-performing teams. At Google, they want all the teams to be the highest of the high-performing, so they spun up a [...]
A team is a group of two or more people aligned with a common goal. A high-performance team is a team that is objectively better than other teams doing similar work (or with a similar goal, if it’s not a work team). Objectively better means that we can measure teams and compare them to each other. Aim for objective metrics that someone outside [...]
Have you ever tandem-bicycled? Molly and I cycled across Upper Austria on a tandem this summer. We enjoyed the vistas of the Danube River with its lush green hills, medieval towns and castles, and vineyards. Tandem cycling is an incredible team experience. Being on one bike together brings us into a state of high "teamness." [...]
It seems like everyone has high-performance teams on their mind. Just this morning, I had a great conversation with a young army veteran who had led teams. He said he experienced some incredibly bad teams during his stint in the army. The teams were toxic. They were run by bullying and negativity. His team leaders complained about everything that [...]
I joined my wife, Molly, and a group of around 25 old and new friends at the Open Space Institute’s conference on Peace and High Performance. I drew this quick sketch of Harrison Owen, creator of Open Space Technology as he reminded us how easy it is to connect using Open Space: just sit in [...]
I’ve been on tour, sharing my Building Great Teams with the Core Protocols class and talk all over North America and in London. And I’m honored and grateful for the positive reviews, reflections, and connections to other people’s work. Hannes Horn writes about his experience in my half-day class on Medium . He describes [...]
Want your students or clients to really learn Agile? Then get them to teach Agile to themselves. Experience Agile is the activity I use to close my two-day Agile class. Students learn Agile by doing Agile and by teaching Agile to each other. The assignment: Design, implement, and deliver a product that teaches you everything [...]
Introducing my book, The Core Protocols: A Guide to Greatness. Here’s the blurb: Want to live in greatness? This book is your guide. The Core Protocols show you how to discover and obtain what you want, on your own, with your friends and family, and with the people you work with. Follow [...]
On May 1, 2015, a group of 16 people gathered at Crystal Lake near Seattle, Washington. We announced to the world that we feel. That we suffer and that we are responsible. That we want a world filled with abundant love and greatness. That we have been "booted" running a new operating system, the [...]
Here’s a great Scrum scaling pattern based on the pattern that one of my clients uses. They use this pattern to scale their 500 people into a very successfully business unit of a huge technology company. For each Product Backlog, there is one Product Owner (PO), one Scrum Master (SM), and up to four [...]
Are your Sprint Planning meetings painful? Are your Sprint outcomes always as great as you want? Have you ever held a Sprint Retrospective and decided to get your Product Backlog truly Ready? Here’s an outline of a Product Backlog Refinement Workshop I use with teams I manage and coach: Goals The goals [...]
Hi there! I'm so glad you visited! This blog focuses on learning activities that work in physical space. Want 15+ amazingly fun learning activities that work online? Then take a look at this article, Your Remote Team Actually Can Be Awesome. Enjoy! I love using games and interactive activities when I share Scrum and [...]
Welcome back to the Scrum Master Skills Series! In part 1, I shared my notes on how to facilitate a great Sprint Planning session. Here, in part 2, I share my notes on ho to facilitate a great Daily Scrum. Enjoy! INTRO Facilitate: to make facile, to make easy. That’s your job as facilitator. [...]
Which is better, Open Space Technology or Lean Coffee? We explored Open Space and Lean Coffee at QCon London 2014. We put 15 facilitated peer sharing sessions on the program. We thought we would hold a series of 15 short Open Spaces, each one focused on a different conference track, staggered throughout the day. The conference was three days long, [...]
Hi there! I'm so glad you visited! After you read this article, check out my courses, latest book, podcast, and other blog articles. Enjoy! Welcome to the Scrum Masters Skills Series! In part 1, I share my notes on how to facilitate a great Sprint Planning session. Enjoy! INTRO Facilitate: to make [...]
What is the manager’s role in an Agile team? In the typical Agile training class, we learn about Scrum’s three roles: Product Owner, Development Team member, and Scrum Master. Where do managers fit in? Should managers be afraid that their job title isn’t part of Scrum? What is a manager, anyway? In industrial management [...]
This is a transcript of the pecha kucha I shared at Give Thanks for Scrum 2013 in November. My slides are here. I’m Richard Kasperowski. I’m an independent Agile coach and Open Space facilitator. I wasn’t sure what to say today, so I followed the advice on page 11 of the Scrum Guide and held a retrospective. I used [...]
I've been thinking about "the good life" a lot lately, inspired by reading John H. Bodley's textbook, Cultural Anthropology: Tribes, States, and the Global System. Bodley uses the term summum bonum in his discussion on the good life. He definessummum bonum as, "the maximum human good … as culturally defined". Bodley writes: ... in addition [...]
Who am I? I do great things with great people. I am a Business Transformation Coach, Agile Coach, and Open Space Facilitator. I help people, teams, and organizations understand what they have, discover and align around what they want, and transform from what they have to what they want. What is a coach? A coach [...]
This is an edited transcript of my presentation at Rebel Jam, a global 24-hour long conference on positively changing business, government, education, healthcare, and the world itself. You can find my slides here. I do great things with great people I’m Richard Kasperowski. My vision is that I do great things with great people. Everything [...]
What is the perfect job? I'm playing Perfection Game with myself. If I were to give my job a perfection rating, the criteria would be: I do great things with great people--my personal vision. I'm not doing mediocre things, and I'm not doing things with mediocre people. Everything else derives from this vision. (My vision [...]
Cancel your sprint. You'll be glad you did. I cancelled a sprint this week. We had begun building a new software increment, and we were on track to get it done. During the sprint, we discovered the limits of our approach, and shared what we learned with our customer. Our customer shared with their [...]
If my mom asked me, "What's Scrum?," what would I tell her? Here's my answer.Scrum is a way to take great ideas, turn them into a great product, and end up with happy people. Imagine a group of people doing something cool together, maybe inventing new tech product, or something else innovative that no one's [...]
Hi there! I'm so glad you visited! After you read this article, check out my courses, latest book, podcast, and other blog articles. Enjoy! Self-management and self-organization, or command-and-control: it's a deliberate choice for you and your team, not a default that you blindly accept. But what if your team [...]
Thanks to everyone who attended my session, "Radical Innovation: The Six Week Open Space Experiment," at Scrum Gathering Barcelona 2012 this week. My slides are here. My hope: each of you will hold Open Space when you return home. Will you share your experience with me?
If you could only read one book on Agile, which would it be? What about two books? Three or more? Here is the Official Agile Reading List, the full list of recommended reading to get you Agile: Manifesto for Agile Software Development. Start here. Everything else derives from this. The Scrum Guide by Ken Schwaber and [...]
I build great software with great people. We need a great space in which to do it. For the last year, we’ve been experimenting with an open plan collaboration space. Instead of working as individuals in cubicles, we work together in a space with no walls between us. For the first six months, [...]
Perfection Ping Pong is derived from the Perfection Game, one of the McCarthy Technologies Core Protocols, and inspired by TDD Ping Pong. This game will support you in your desire to aggregate the best ideas with people who are available only via communication channels such as email and IM. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ping-Pong_2.jpg Player A and Player [...]
The Agile Games conference is great. I have the privilege of participating in this year’s conference as a facilitator. On Friday, April 20, I will lead a game session called “Self Management: 5 Games with Motion.” We’ll play kinesthetic games that explore command-and-control versus self management. These are some of the most outrageously fun games you’ll ever [...]
You opt in and show up at a meeting. You type an email to your boss. Or maybe you IM someone in another building. Sometimes you tweet something or send a text message. Would you do that if you were having dinner with a close friend? Would you act like your friend isn’t worthy of [...]
Six weeks of Open Space—it’s a new world record! I facilitated a six-week-long Open Space with my software development team. As far as we know, this is a unique experience: we are the only people in the world to have held an Open Space for such a long time. We pushed the limits of Open Space [...]
Want to kill your high performance agile dev team? Make it hard for them to deploy to Production. Set up a bureaucracy of approval gates, review boards, committees, and meetings. Make sure they miss their deadlines and disappoint their customers. Control them until they can't get anything done. Don’t let them [...]
My Product Owner is my business owner. He deserves all the credit when we succeed, and all the blame when we fail. He has the most important role in my Agile team. He should be the highest paid because he takes the greatest risk: if he fails, he’s fired. So says Mike Dwyer, and I agree. My PO [...]
Once upon a time, the team was having trouble getting things Done. We asked why, five times. We found a root cause: we struggle to get backlog items Done because we aren't Ready on sprint planning day. So we brainstormed a Definition of Ready. We use it as a checklist to ensure we understand each backlog item well [...]
Dear Future Product Owner, Congratulations on your new job. I want you to play a strong Product Owner role. I am excited about this. We haven’t had a strong Product Owner. The backlog is yours. You define it: you tell us what you want, and you understand what our customers want. You prioritize it: you [...]
A colleague writes: Is Information Overload Wasting 40% of Your Time? In general, multiple studies have indicated that >50% of people feel like they are experiencing "Information Overload”. At the more detailed level, Basex (a consulting firm that focuses on this area) derived the following from a survey intended to determine “How does a typical [...]
Playing well together is important: communicating, learning, sharing, getting things done. Our native culture shapes how we think, how we behave, and how we perceive our coworkers. Geert Hofstede is a master of understanding culture. In his book, Culture’s Consequences, 2nd ed., he shares the data and analysis of many years of research on national cultures. [...]
Happiness is important.Happiness is a leading indicator of your team’s success. Many economists think a happiness metric is more important than GDP and other metrics. Want to knew whether your team is happy--whether your team is trending toward success? Play this game, and find out. Rock-paper-scissors Happiness In this game, team [...]
High tech andon lights are great. Your build breaks, your tests don’t pass, a server goes down, and the bright red light goes on. The team swarms, someone fixes the build, and the light goes green. It’s all good. But it takes some technical effort to set up that magic red/green light. Why not go low [...]
Lean optimization: a case study (Alternate title: Lean optimization of the home brewery) Subtitle: Why does my back hurt? (Alternate subtitle: How to convince my wife I need a kegerator) Beer is good. Homebrew is better. I don’t brew often enough, but when I do, my back hurts the next day. I must be [...]
Here are some highlights from the amazing Agile Games 2011 conference . First, my major themes from the event: Learn Fast, not Fail Fast Teach People Early, not Disappoint People Early Luke Hohmann of Innovation Games gave a rousing inspirational keynoteabout how awesome it is to work on software. One key problem he noted is that we don’t talk to our customers [...]
I’ll be dead soon. I’ve been out in the cold rain for three hours. Hypothermia is setting in. You try to sell me a mansion. You show me the plot plan and the floor plan; you did a lot of planning up front. You brag about the foundation, firm and solid, ready to last [...]
led two sessions at this year’s Mobile Camp Boston on February 19: one on mobile consumer identity, and the other on agile software development. Give them what they want: mobile consumer identity We talked about knowing your mobile customers. The most important question for you to ask your customers is, would [...]
We do a series of sprints to build our product, then we do 4-8 weeks of hardening sprints to really test our code and get the bugs out before we deploy it in production. Guess what? You’re not Agile, and you’re not doing Scrum. You are using the jargon, maybe because it’s fashionable, or [...]
The programmers write new code so fast, the testers can’t keep up. It’s like shooting a firehose into a straw. It doesn’t matter how fast the programmers shoot new code out of the firehose, because the testers have to get it all through the straw before we can say it’s Done and deploy it in [...]
Pay people enough that they don't have to worry about money, and they'll perform well. Don't bother with monetary incentives beyond that. Want people to perform better? Establish an environment that encourages masteryand purpose. That's the essence of this great video from the nice people at the RSA.Thanks to Jeff Sutherland for the pointer.
What is the ideal sprint length? I've been thinking about this a couple of ways. First, what is your definition of Done? For my teams, Done means, concisely, it can be deployed in production, and people can use it world-wide. Then, think about your minimum batch size. How much work do you have to do [...]
Done is the crux of doing Agile well. You can do all the Agile activities--the iteration planning, the daily standup, the burndown--and still suck. But if you focus on getting things Done, two things happen. First, you start to actually get stuff done, and you can recognize your success. Second, when you don't get stuff done, [...]
At the Scrum Gathering in Orlando, we talked about company management as an impediment to the adoption of Agile and Scrum within organizations. Within the Scrum/Agile community, we are all believers and advocates. We network within our community. We publish data that support the adoption of Agile and Scrum, and we trust the data because [...]
Don't change In parts one and two of this three part series, I explored that you need to be prepared and that finding a job is your job. Before you needed a job, you were doing a lot of things right. Why stop now? Keep doing the things that made you successful in the past, and you’ll be [...]
Finding a job is your job In part one of this three part series, we explored that you need to be prepared. Part two is about the fact that finding a job is your job. Don't act like you don't have a job, because you do. You don't get a paycheck for it at the end of the [...]
Motivation I am a loser, a good for nothing jobless scum.Not really, but that’s how I sometimes felt when I was looking for a job. Are you looking for work? Are you good at it? How long will it take for you to find a job?I left a job I loved to join a small promising [...]
Your dev team sucks. Use Agile software development for mobile, and be awesome. That was my pitch Saturday morning at MobileCampBoston3. I led a session later that day, titled "Agile for Mobile." I introduced Agile, explained some of its rationale, and identified some of the Agile frameworks. I talked a lot about Scrum and a little about XP. I [...]
I am now officially a Certified Scrum Practitioner. So what? So it signifies that my peers recognize that I understand Scrum pretty well. The certification shows I have actually applied Scrum for real, on a real project, in a real organization, for real stakeholders. It's not a big deal, really. It's just a token from an independent [...]
Anyone can write code, but how do you effectively lead a team building an excellent software product? To guide your team to greatness, you have to be a great technical leader. A great tech leader does three things: know what to build, help the team build it, and help the team continuously improve. [...]
am doing two presentations today at the Scrum Gathering: Sneaky Scrum, a way to sneak Scrum into your organization From AnyCo to AwesomeCo: A Case Study in Scrum Transformation Enjoy!
I will be presenting at this year's Scrum Gathering in Orlando, March 8-10. My first presentation is Sneaky Scrum, a Pecha-Kucha, on March 9 at 8:00 in Sanibel 1 & 2: Does your organization resist Scrum? Is your boss afraid of Scrum because of the strange jargon and lack of big up front planning? Do your developers [...]
Every wonder how many Certified Scrum people there are? The Scrum Alliance web site has the answer. Scrum Alliance lists the names of all the registered certificate holders at http://www.scrumalliance.org/training. If I count correctly, these are the numbers, as of January 13, 2010: CSM CSPO CSP CSC CST Registered practitioners 53,990 3,558 908 23 105 There is [...]
The Scrum Guide is the definitive guide to Scrum. It precisely summarizes and hones the canonical sources from earlier this decade: Ken Schwaber's books, Agile Software Development with Scrum and Agile Project Management with Scrum (affiliate links). The Scrum Guide is hosted at scrum.org under the aegis of Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland.
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. [...]
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 [...]
I presented Winning Clients with Scrum and Agile last night at ICCA Boston. Thanks to Norm for inviting me.
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!
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 [...]
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 [...]
Michael James of Danube recently published the Scrum cheat sheet on Refcardz. Download it, read it, and live it--it's good!
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
I am now officially a Certified ScrumMaster, registered with the Scrum Alliance.
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.
First he butters me up: "As one of my best managers, I thought I'd get some advice..." Then he makes a genuine request for help: "... on how perhaps my company should structure one of their processes... in particular, team meetings" I offer a snarky response: "Meetings suck. Avoid them." And then I get interrupted [...]
Is the milk in your refrigerator safe to drink, or is it rotten? Open the bottle and take a sniff. If it stinks, it's probably rotten. You don't have to taste it. You don't have to drink a pint of it and see whether you get sick. You know immediately that it's no good. Throw [...]
