Patterns organize implicit knowledge about how people successfully solve recurring problems. Patterns describe solutions that have been successfully applied on numerous occasions; they are not theoretical abstractions created in ivory towers. Christopher Alexander defines a pattern as follows: “Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes […]
One of the questions I get asked the most is “What do we mean by feature or user story, and what the hell is an Epic???” If you or anyone you work with has had to deal with detangling the jargon around how Agile describes the outcomes or work being done by different levels in […]
Read More… from Strategic to Tactical – Breaking down work in an Agile environment based on outcomes
Monty Python gives so much we can use in our transformation strategy! Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not some farcical aquatic ceremony! – Servant Leaders You think you’ve had a hard time? I’ve been chained […]
“Our team is going Agile,” “where are you on your Agile journey,” and “what is the most important Agile metric,” might be some things you’ve heard or thought about lately. The answers to these and the many other questions or descriptions I’ve heard in my adventures across the enterprise have been at times confusing, at […]
I had a Scrum Master I was mentoring a while back tell me she was off to a meeting about capacity planning with her Release Train Engineer (it was a SAFe environment) and she was nervous because there was disagreement about how they should handle it, and tensions had begun to rise. I was immediately […]
The worst thing any team can do is to raise expectations through early success, but be unable to sustain the pace. This happens to many Agile teams due to some simple mistakes made in tracking Team Velocity. As a result of these painful misses, some organizations are getting a bad taste for Agile, and are […]
Velocity is the primary measure of the performance of an Agile team.The Agile manifesto values “Finished Software” as the primary deliverable of a team, and team velocity is an agile metric that measures that directly.Measuring Team Velocity: Velocity measures a team’s capacity to do this, by counting Story Points of the stories that are accepted […]
The purpose of Sprint/Iteration Planning is for a team to identify and commit to the total amount of work they think they can to accomplish within a 2 week period. In order to have a successful Sprint Planning meeting, there needs to be an organized, prioritized backlog with a sufficient amount of stories in a […]
Thesis: agile methods can save you money. Are you getting your share? Systematic adoption of agile methods can substantially reduce your project costs; however it can be hard to get these results right away. Most new agile teams don’t see these results until the 3rd or subsequent project. That’s where we come in. We can […]
Read More… from Tapping the power of Scrum for your organization
We’ve all had the experience of being in a group where everything is flowing really well, people are aligned, and everyone’s energy is high. Then one person says or does something that seems to pop the bubble, and the flow of good ideas stops. The typical response in these situations is a kind of uncomfortable […]
Read More… from Increasing Collaboration and Trust in any Kind of Team