Mountain Goat Software

Protecting the Team Cuts Both Ways

Scrum Masters need to protect agile teams from more than just overly aggressive product owners. Learn why a team’s own shortcomings can be equally problematic in this blog post from Mike Cohn.

A Sample Format for a Spreadsheet-Based Product Backlog

I want to show a real easy way to put user stories in a spreadsheet-based product backlog. I wrote this after seeing someone tweet a screen capture of a product backlog I made nine years ago and…

Estimating Non-Functional Requirements

Doing performance testing creates some amount of overhead on the team (the tax). This overhead or tax must be paid regularly.

Time as a Competitive Advantage

An article I read in 1988 has always stuck with me. The article was “Time–The Next Source of Competitive Advantage” by George Stalk in the Harvard Business Review. The article came…

A New Artifact - The Long-Term Product Backlog

Left unattended, a product backlog can become large and hard to work with. If your backlog has reached this point, take some time to do some spring cleaning.

Scrum Alliance & PMI: A Day at the Museum

While the Scrum Alliance and PMI are competitors in some ways, they each serve a common audience, and their real future is together.

In Defense of Making Hard Changes

Scrum doesn't solve problems, it uncovers them and puts them in our face.

Reflections on the 10 Years Since the Agile Manifesto

Ten years from now I hope we’ve stopped calling it agile. I hope we’ve stopped calling it anything at all and are just doing it.

Deciding What Kind of Projects are Most Suited for Agile

Agile is most appropriate on any urgent project with significant complexity and novelty--and that includes software development and weddings.

5 Free Agile & Scrum Tools for Project Planning and Prioritizing

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.

Should Story Points Be Assigned to a Bug Fixing Story?

My usual recommendation is to assign points to bug fixing the agile defects. This really achieves the best of both worlds.

Choosing to Start Small or Go All In when Adopting Agile

When it comes to transitioning to agile a lot of companies wonder whether it is best to start small or go all in. In this article scrum and agile expert Mike Cohn looks at both options and gives…

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