Mountain Goat Software

Choose Backlog Items That Serve Two Purposes

I've been playing a fair amount of Go lately. If you're not familiar with Go, it's a strategy game that originated in China 2,500 years ago. It's along the lines of chess, but it's…

Adding Decorated User Roles to Your User Stories

When writing user stories there are, of course, two parts: user and story. The user is embedded right at the front of stories when using the most common form of writing user stories: As a I so that .…

Teams Should Go So Fast They Almost Spin Out of Control

Yes, I really did refer to guitarist Alvin Lee in a Certified Scrum Product Owner class last week. Here's why. I was making a point that Scrum teams should strive to go as fast as they can without…

Introduction to Scrum PPT

You may have heard Scrum is one of the leading agile software development processes. With more than 650,000…

Presentation

Schedule vs. Cost: The Tradeoff in Agile

Just because a shorter schedule is more important most of the time, does not mean it is more important all of the time.

Paying the Cost for More Precise Estimates

Given enough time, a good agile team can estimate how long a product might take to deliver, even if the product backlog is huge. But the more precise the estimate, the higher the…

4 Reasons to Include Developers in Story Writing

Participants in my Certified ScrumMaster courses are often surprised when I recommend that programmers participate in story-writing workshops. After all, a story-writing workshop is a meeting targeted…

2 Times to Play Planning Poker and 1 Time Not To

I recommend using Planning Poker on product backlog items rather than on the tasks that make up a sprint backlog.

Building a Product Users Want: From Idea to Backlog with the Vision Board

Vision and Backlog Scrum is a great framework for building a product with the right features. It encourages the use of a vision shared by the product owner, the ScrumMaster, the development team, and…

Introducing the LAFABLE Process for Scaling Agile

Over the last year or so, scaling agile and Scrum have become very popular topics. A variety of scaling approaches have been promoted—and...

3 Roles That Need to be Involved in Agile Estimating with Planning Poker

All of a Scrum team’s members should be present when playing Planning Poker. You may be tempted to estimate without the individuals in some role—don’t.

Know Exactly What Velocity Means to Your Scrum Team

To see how this applies to an agile project, consider the issue of whether a team should earn velocity credit for fixing bugs during a sprint. A team that uses velocity to measure how much…

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