New & Notable

It’s Effort, Not Complexity

A client asked me, "When will my team be done with this project?" This is probably the bazillionth time I've been asked that agile project management question in one way or another. I have never once been asked, "How hard will my team have to think to develop this project?" Clients, bosses, customers and stakeholders care about how long a project will take. They don't care about how hard we have to think to deliver the project, except to the extent that…

Popular Posts

Popular Posts in Agile Estimating & Planning

It’s Effort, Not Complexity

A client asked me, "When will my team be done with this project?" This is probably the bazillionth time I've been asked that agile project management question in one way or another. I have never once been asked, "How hard will my team have to think to develop this project?"…

Why I Don’t Use Story Points for Sprint Planning

As described in Agile Estimating and Planning, I'm a huge fan of using story points for estimating the product backlog. However, I also recommend estimating the sprint backlog in hours rather than in points. Why this seeming contradiction? I've previously blogged on the…

How Do Story Points Relate to Hours?

I'm often asked about the relationship between story points and hours. People who ask are usually looking for me to say something like "one story point = 8.3 hours." Well, that just isn't the case (especially since I made up 8.3 hours). Let's see what the real relationship is…

Most Popular Tags

agile agile estimating agile processes backlog customers defect management estimating iterations management metrics prioritizing product owner release planning scrum sprint planning sprints story points transitioning to agile user stories velocity

Popular Posts in Transitioning to Agile

Please Help Me List the Problems with Using Agile or Scrum

I'm trying to create a list of the biggest, most common, or hardest to overcome agile problems that a team might face when adopting Scrum. I could really use your help by contributing to the list by adding a comment to this post. I'm thinking of things like: We have five…

Differences Between Scrum and Extreme Programming

Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP) are definitely very aligned. In fact, if you walked in on a team doing one of these processes you might have hard time quickly deciding whether you had walked in on a Scrum team or an XP team. The differences are often quite subtle, but they…

Recommendations not Rules

I seem to be encountering more and more people who want to codify agile into a set of rules. I've seen this lately in authors of books, blogs or PDFs about agile or Scrum that say "You must do this" or "If you don't do this or all of that then you're not doing it right." Over…

Most Popular Tags

agile agile books agile manifesto agile presentations agile processes agile product management agile project management agile projects backlog continuous improvement lean metrics mike cohn product owner scrum scrum teams scrummaster story points testing transitioning to agile

Popular Posts in Sprinting

The Rules vs. The Generally Accepted Practices of Scrum

In a post back in March I introduced a term on this blog that I'd been trying out in discussions and a few classes. The term was GASP and it stood for a Generally Accepted Scrum Practice. What I'm interested in right now, and I'm hoping everyone here will help with, is…

Working With “Storyless Tasks”

A question I get frequently is what to do with tasks that do not belong to a particular user story or product backlog item. Common examples I’m asked about include tasks like “update the build server to use the latest version of FitNesse.” Fixing bugs from prior iterations are…

Should a Team Swarm on to One Backlog Item at a Time?

This week I want to address the question of whether a team should work on one product backlog item at a time or whether it's OK to work on multiple items. In general, a team should feel comfortable working on multiple product backlog items at the same time during an iteration.…

Most Popular Tags

agile agile books agile practices agile product management agile project management agile projects backlog customers defect management product owner scrum scrum teams sprint sprint planning sprinting sprints taskboard teamwork testing user stories

Popular Posts in Meetings

Daily Scrum: Not Just for ScrumMasters

I never refer to the daily scrum (or daily standup) meeting as a "status meeting." The term "status meeting" is too pejorative for most of us. For me it conjures images of sitting around a table with each person giving an update to a project manager while everyone else feigns…

GASPing About the Product Backlog

I've been wondering lately if Scrum is on the verge of getting a new standard meeting--the Backlog Grooming Meeting, which is a meeting an increasing number of teams are doing each sprint to make sure the product backlog is prepared and ready for the start of the next sprint. To see why a Backlog Grooming Meeting may be a few years away from becoming a Generally Accepted Scrum Practice, or what I call a GASP, let's revisit the early 2000s.

Should the Daily Standup Be Person-by-Person or Story-by-Story?

I want to address a question that I got recently and that comes up every month or two. I was recently emailed the following: Most of our teams complete 10 or more user stories per sprint. When answering the 3 questions in the daily Scrum, it was clear what each person was…

Most Popular Tags

agile backlog daily scrum distributed teams scrum scrummaster sprint planning sprints teamwork

Popular Posts in User Stories and Product Backlog

Advantages of the “As a user, I want” user story template

In my user stories book and in all my training and conference sessions on user stories I advocate writing user stories in the form of: "As a <type of user>, I want <some goal> so that <some reason>." While I consider the so-that clause optional, I really like this template.…

Non-functional Requirements as User Stories

A common challenge with writing user stories is how to handle a product's non-functional requirements. These are requirements that are not about specific functionality ("As a user of a word processor, I want to insert a table into my document."), but are rather about an…

Writing User Stories for Back-end Systems

I was asked recently how to go about writing user stories for a back-end financial system. This is an interesting example and is a question I get asked a lot, so I thought I should answer it here. This example brings up a couple of key interesting challenges: While there…

Most Popular Tags

agile agile projects agile requirements backlog customers defect management distributed teams product owner release planning scrum teams sprint planning sprints taskboard teamwork use cases user stories

Popular Posts in Scrum/Agile Roles

The Fallacy of “One Throat to Choke”

In speaking with some agile teams and agile project management consultants I occasionally hear two statements that I strongly disagree with. These statements are that “the product owner is the single wringable neck on the project” or that the “product owner is the one throat…

Ssssh….Agile Is All About Micromanaging

Sometimes when I'm teaching a Certified ScrumMaster class, I let the attendees in on the deep, dark secret of agile: It's all about micromanagement. Almost every principle and practice of agile is there to support micromangagement. The daily scrum is about micro-managing…

How To Fail With Agile

Not everyone involved in an agile transition wants the change to be successful. This tongue-in-cheek article details twenty things you can do to sabotage an agile transition. Of course, the twenty things also serve as reminders of things to avoid or watch out for.

Most Popular Tags

agile agile books agile pmo agile processes agile project management agile projects backlog customers impediments management product owner scrum scrum roles scrum teams scrummaster teamwork

Popular Posts in Scaling Scrum/Agile

Establishing a Common Baseline for Story Points

A common criticism of story points is that the meaning of a story point will differ among teams. In this post I want to describe how can we establish a common definition of a story point across multiple teams within an organization. The best way I've found to do this is to…

Is It a Good Idea to Establish a Common Baseline for Story Points?

In a previous post, I wrote about how to establish a common baseline for story points across relatively large teams (a few hundred developers). In this post I want to consider whether doing so is a good idea. The need for a common baseline to story points usually arises from…

The Benefits of Feature Teams

Moving away from component teams is a difficult but necessary step for those who want to adopt an agile project management approach. For example, when I first began to consult for a certain California-based game studio, its teams were organized around the specific elements and…

Most Popular Tags

agile projects distributed teams estimating metrics product owner scrum teams sprints story points teamwork velocity

Popular Posts in News

Win a Copy (or Two) of Succeeding with Agile

Succeeding with Agile: Software Development using Scrum is now shipping. To celebrate, I will be giving a copy of the book to two readers of this blog. To win, enter as a comment to this post the one most valuable bit of advice you would give to a team that wanted to succeed…

Agile Succeeds Three Times More Often Than Waterfall

Agile projects are successful three times more often than non-agile projects, according to the 2011 CHAOS report 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…

Scrum Alliance Update

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…

Most Popular Tags

agile agile 2013 agile books agile estimating agile game development agile presentations agile product management agile project management agile release planning estimating metrics mike cohn prioritizing release planning scrum scrum alliance sprint planning testing transitioning to agile user stories

Popular Posts in Musings

Reflections on the 10 Years Since the Agile Manifesto

Today is the tenth anniversary of the start of the meeting that resulted in the Agile Manifesto. Much has changed in the ten years since the Agile Manifesto, continous improvement being one of them. Back then, the processes encompassed by the Manifesto—Extreme Programming,…

A Requirements Challenge

I have always done highly iterative development and have always worked in short iterations. Initially this was because the domains I worked in early in my career gave me no choice but to work that way. Later I discovered the philosophical reasons for working this way. I also…

Miscommunicating with the written word

What a wonderfully poor medium it is to communicate with written words. I'm sometimes amazed that we're able to communicate meaning at all. Here are two good examples of how hard it is to communicate with written words.  A few weeks ago I was traveling and decided it was time…

Most Popular Tags

agile agile manifesto agile product management agile requirements agile software development certification management metrics prioritizing programming sprint planning user stories

Popular Posts in Video Recorded

Most Popular Tags

Recent Posts

What Topics Would You Like Mike Cohn to Cover?

I’ve learned a lot about the challenges people face over the years across varying organizations when it comes to agile development and Scrum. But I’m always looking to help people solve their toughest or most nagging problems – and sometimes it’s easier to…