Mountain Goat Software

ADAPTing to Agile

You know that you want to become a more agile development organization, but you aren’t sure how to…

Presentation

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…

Interview on National Public Radio about Daily Standups

Mike Cohn is interviewed by Sarah Gardner from National Public Radio on the importance of the daily standup meeting.

Points Are About Relative Effort Not Ranking

Story points on an agile product backlog represent the effort to implement the backlog item.

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.

Estimating and Planning Are Necessary for Maximizing Delivered Value

Planning is the act of thinking about the future. Sometimes that future holds risk and uncertainty. In those cases we plan more than when the future is highly predictable as a hundredth visit to your…

In Defense of Large Numbers

Removing the large values from a deck of Planning Poker cards is like deciding to strike millions and billions from our vocabulary just because our bank balances are only in the thousands.

Agile in the Age of Hyperspecialization

Agile does not at all require individuals to be generalists, but individuals are expected to work together as a team.

Simulating a Project by Resampling Velocity

Resampling is based on the idea that things we’ll observe in the future will be similar to the things we’ve observed in the past.

Seeing How Well a Team’s Story Points Align from One to Eight

The topic of how well a team estimates two point stories relative to one point stories (and so on) has come up in a couple of comments and replies on this blog recently, so let's discuss it.…

Estimating a Full Backlog Based on a Sample of It

How do we estimate how many hours it will take to deliver a given product backlog if we have no historical data at all?

Case Study on ePlan Services

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…

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