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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
