The following was originally published in Mike Cohn's monthly newsletter. If you like what you're reading, sign up to have this content delivered to your inbox weeks before it's posted here.
I've decided we should kick all the testers out of sprint retrospectives. We don't need them. They aren't really part of the team, anyway. 
They think differently and their issues…
When writing user stories, one of the first considerations is who to write the user story for. Despite the name--user stories--it is sometimes beneficial to write stories for someone other than the user. No, I don’t necessarily mean we want a bunch of “programmer stories.” Those are generally best avoided. Rather, I’m referring to writing what we may want to call “customer…
The following was originally published in Mike Cohn's monthly newsletter. If you like what you're reading, sign up to have this content delivered to your inbox weeks before it's posted here.
It's a new year--that fabled time of midnight parties, resolutions, and, for us Americans, football bowl games. Well, the parties and the big bowl games are over. So the only thing…
A Scrum trainer recently asked for a couple of good, real examples of large user stories (epics) being split into smaller stories. I thought it would be useful to share those examples here as well since the companies where these came from gave me permission to share them.
Example 1: Selecting Marketing Campaigns
This first example is from a company that sells software to…
I ended up in a Twitter-storm lately defending the idea that all estimation is not waste. It truly concerns me that more and more agilists seem to be saying this. I will be the first to admit that not every project benefits from estimation. But I suspect that it's a pretty rare project where no estimation at all needs to be done.
Estimating is a way of buying knowledge. If…
The following was originally published in Mike Cohn's monthly newsletter. If you like what you're reading, sign up to have this content delivered to your inbox weeks before it's posted here.
Ahh, it's fall. Not only does it bring the return of great, cooler weather but it also brings [American] football. And when there are football games, there are articles about football…
I've been remiss in blogging as often as I should. I'm sorry and promise to do better. On the bright side, I've gotten caught up on a dozen or so things that were taking up mental energy.
I am frequently asked why the company is called Mountain Goat.
The problem of some individuals rambling on and on and on and on ... during the daily scrum has been with us probably since the first sprint. I recently came across a brilliant technique to help encourage people to keep it short.
Whoever is giving their update during the daily scrum needs to hold a 3 kilogram (6-1/2 pound) medicine ball at arm's length. This is light enough that you can hold the medicine ball while giving your updated, but it's heavy enough that you don't want to give a long update.
I want to address a term in the Scrum (and even the broader agile world) that has largely outlived its usefulness: release planning. As commonly used (including by me), "release planning" has meant looking forward a handful (or more) sprints and making a prediction of what would be delivered by then. Ideally these predictions were expressed as ranges, perhaps even using…
Many teams struggle with keeping the daily scrum short. Some teams even exceed the standard fifteen-minute time box on a routine basis. I was teaching a Certified Scrum Master course a couple of weeks ago and someone there mentioned a great idea that I want to share.
When someone in the daily scrum starts to say something that would go deeper or beyond the traditional scope...
