Advantages of User Stories over Requirements and Use Cases At the surface, user stories appear to have much in common with use cases and traditional …
Choosing to Start Small or Go All In when Adopting Agile When it comes to transitioning to agile a lot of companies wonder whether it is best to start small …
The Roles of the Project Management Office in Scrum A project management office (PMO) that is engaged in and supportive of transitioning to Scrum can …
Agile Teamwork High-performing Scrum teams have learned to do a little bit of everything during a sprint, thereby …
The Art of Compromise The concepts of agility and project governance are not fundamentally opposed. Each is an attempt to …
Rolling Lookahead Planning Rolling lookahead planning is a useful technique for large projects or any project with external …
How To Fail With Agile Not everyone involved in an agile transition wants the change to be successful. This …
The Chivalrous Team Member In seeking to improve how we develop software, we continually inspect and adapt. While thinking …
Writing the Product Backlog Just in Time and Just Enough This article addresses the issue of how much detail should be included in product backlog items and …
Patterns of Agile Adoption There are many ways to transition to an agile process. Choosing the approach that is most likely to …
Advice on Conducting the Scrum of Scrums Meeting The scrum of scrums meeting is an important technique in scaling Scrum to large project teams. …
ScrumMaster: Appointed or Team-Selected? The selection of a new Scrum team’s ScrumMaster can impact the success or failure of the team's …
Writing Contracts for Agile Development User stories are a great way to get people talking about requirements. However, there's a reason …
Metrics You Can Bet On Numbers may not lie, but measurements can sure mislead you. This article explores two myths about …
Sprint Planning Many teams try to divide and conquer when it comes to sprint planning, often with disjointed and …
The Certainty of Uncertainty If the only certain things in life are death and taxes, why do so many teams think that if they …
The Role of Learning and Expected Cost of Change An academic paper that describes the importance of using more than just the vaguely defined …
Incorporating Learning and Expected Cost of Change An experience report presented at XP2006 covering why it is not as simple as telling product owners …
Change Is Good…Or is It? Change may be a constant, but it doesn't have to be constant. By following some simple guidelines, …
Scrum Shouldn’t Be a Burden Scrum was designed to be lightweight, so if your team is complaining that it's too heavy, you need …
Selecting the Right Iteration Length A key consideration in adopting an iterative process is selecting how long your iterations will be. …
I Didn’t Know I Needed That! Products that do everything they're supposed to do and offer consumers something they like, but …
Put a Tough Decision in Its Place Are you shirking your decision-making responsibility? It happens more often than you think, and …
Distance Remaining Is More Important than Distance Covered With no land in sight to guide them, it would have been all too easy for early sailors to get lost …
Estimating With Use Case Points Too much work goes into use cases to not employ them to their full potential. By assigning points …
Do It Yourself Projects fail for a plethora of reasons; one article could not hope to address all of them. …
The Dark Side of Multitasking Multitasking makes us feel more productive, but in truth trying to take on more than two tasks …
Stop Listening to Your Users Users are often kept at arm's length. We ask them for their input on the design, but then we, as …
A Regular Heartbeat We all crave regularity. We want a steady rhythm and a strong downbeat so we know the steps we need …
What’s Holding You Back? I was honored to be the guest editor of a special issue of Better Software magazine that was …
Writing User Stories - Questioning Your Users Let's face it, most people don't know what they want. Most of us just
Want Better Software? Just Ask This article presents very specific advice on seven things a product owner or customer can do to …
Toward a Catalog of Scrum Smells This article was written for the Scrum Alliance soapbox. It presents an initial collection of Scrum …
Introducing An Agile Process to an Organization The transition from a plan-driven to an agile process affects not only the development team …
Configuration Bugs that Bite Over the years we've come up with many useful database development techniques. This article …
The Need for Agile Project Management Ken Schwaber and I co-wrote this article to help counter the misperception that agile projects do …
The Upside of Downsizing This article describes how a project was successfully downsized from 100 to 12 developers. To make …
4 Metrics to Support Project Estimates This article describes some very useful metrics that are probably worth collecting on any project.