Agile projects are successful three times more often than non-agile projects, according to the 2011 CHAOS Manifesto from the Standish Group. The report goes so far as to say, "The agile process is the universal remedy for software development project failure. Software applications developed through the agile process have three times the success rate of the traditional…

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I'm in the midst of reading Specification by Example by Gojko Adzic. I'm a big fan of his earlier, Bridging the Communication Gap book so I've been anxious to read his new one. I'll post a full review when I'm done with it. However, I wanted to share a sample chapter of the book here. I got permission from the publisher to share this chapter because it is about ePlan…

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Mike Cohn, author and scrum agile expert, will bring his Agile software development training classes, Certified ScrumMaster, Succeeding with Agile, Certified Scrum Product Owner, Agile User Stories and Agile Estimating and Planning training to parts of the United States and Europe. Layfayette, CO November 29, 2010 -- ScrumMaster and agile expert Mike Cohn has announced his…

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Mountain Goat Software and Mike Cohn, author and Agile Scrum expert, have announced the release of four free tools used in agile and scrum projects for planning and prioritizing.

Layfayette, CO November 6, 2010 -- Mountain Goat Software, an agile training and scrum certification company, has released five free agile and scrum tools ScrumMasters and Agile teams can use…

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I've been invited by the PMI Agile Community of Practice to present a webinar. It will be held on February 15, 2011 at noon Eastern time and will last one hour. The topic is "The Seven Sins of Project Management." Here's the session description:

Agile approaches to software development promise many advantages: shorter schedules, more productive teams, products that better…

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By now you may have heard that I am the new chairman of the board for the Scrum Alliance. Esther Derby, Ken Schwaber and I cofounded the Scrum Alliance a handful of years ago and it's grown tremendously since then. We have over 100,000 members, which is pretty amazing when I think back to the days when the people who knew about Scrum would have fit in a conference room.…

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If you want to see want agile look likes when applied at the corporate level, check out the new book, The Leader's Guide to Radical Management, by Stephen Denning. Denning is the author of a handful of other excellent, award-winning books and this one is his best yet. As he describes in the book, Denning set out to discover why so many of today's organizations are…

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The Chinese edition of Succeeding with Agile will be available in about two weeks (end of October). The book was very kindly translated by Luyu Yang, Jingbin Liao, Andrew Lv, and Zhengyun Chen. They used Scrum to work together on the translation in the ScrumCN.com community. The book will be published through Tsinghua University. Thank you to everyone for making this…

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My three books on agile made this list of "The Top 100 Agile Books" by Jurgen Appelo. He used an objective method of ranking books based on Amazon.com and GoodRead.com quality ratings and popularity. His blog explains the approach. Uncle Bob Martin and I were each fortunate enough to have two books in the top ten. Just about all the books on the list are worth reading so…

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Laurie Williams, a professor at North Carolina State University, recently conducted a survey to find out which principles and practices are used by agile teams. If you read my monthly newsletter, you probably saw the announcement asking for people to participate. She had over 300 responses and released the results today. Among the findings were that these are the most…

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