You believe that agility is right for your team and for your business. You’ve implemented Scrum or XP with some success but have run into some obstacles in moving beyond your initial improvements. You are not alone. The fact is few teams have achieved the 10x productivity or quality gains that the best agile teams have shown us are possible. Partial, half-hearted agile… Read more

You know that before the development team writes their first line of code, they need a funded project and a prioritized product backlog. What you don’t yet know is how all the front-end planning works on an agile project, where just-in-time and just-enough are the rule of the day. And you aren’t quite sure how to apply user stories and story points from the very start of a… Read more

The biggest risk to most projects is building the wrong product. Regardless of how fast your agile team becomes, how brilliant your technical solutions are, or how many automated tests run continuously, you need to ensure that you are building the right thing.

In these presentations, Certified Scrum Trainer and agile expert Mike Cohn, examines both non-financial and… Read more

Maybe you work for a vendor who must bid for work in response to an RFP. Or perhaps your company wants to hire a software development organization for a particular project, but aren’t sure how to structure a contract with an agile shop. Then again, maybe you need to outsource part of your development and need to structure a contract with an agile team. Whatever your… Read more

You’ve probably heard some people say, “Agile teams don’t plan.” Nothing could be further from the truth. These sessions, including one presented to the teams at Google, blow that myth out of the water!

These presentations, by leading agile speaker and author Mike Cohn, explain how agile teams plan. Learn why story points have become the most popular unit for estimating… Read more

Maybe you’ve heard about agile software development projects but aren’t sure if they allow for the detailed planning and estimation your business requires. You might also worry if your team provides the estimates that management wants, the numbers might come back to haunt you. Whether you are a manager, programmer, tester, or have another role that involves project planning,… Read more

When will you be done? Though this question doesn’t go away on agile projects, it does get a little easier to answer. Why? One big reason is agile teams use a metric called velocity, which allows them to track, forecast, and communicate their progress. What you have likely discovered, however, is velocity is difficult to estimate when your team lacks the data and stability… Read more