Agile teams are told to “embrace change,” which is the subtitle to Kent Beck’s wonderful Extreme Programming Explained book. Although an agile team can embrace change, the…
It’s quite common for a team to have a bit of unfinished work at the end of an agile sprint or iteration. Ideally, a team would finish every item on its sprint backlog every sprint. But, for a…
Over the past few months, I've read a few books on marketing. But I've also taken a handful of video training courses on marketing and have been listening to some enjoyable podcasts on the…
I've written before that we should only estimate if having the estimate will change someone's actions. Normally, this means that the team should estimate work only if having the estimate will…
I’ve noticed something disturbing over the past two years. And it’s occurred uniformly with teams I’ve worked with all across the world. It’s the tendency to create an…
A very oft-cited metric is that 64 percent of features in products are “rarely or never used.” The source for this claim was Jim Johnson, chairman of the Standish Group, who presented it…
It is good practice to first write large user stories (commonly known as epics) and then to split them into smaller pieces, a process known as <> When product backlog items are split, they are…
User stories are great. When you’ve got users, that is. Sometimes, though, the users of a system or product are so far removed that a team struggles to put users into their stories. A sign that…
It’s July—find something to celebrate with your team. Unless your “down under,” you’re probably enjoying nicer weather than you have the rest of the year. We’re…
In general, a Scrum product owner's job is to specify what to build, not how to build it. Read this blog from Mike Cohn to understand when and why it is OK for agile product owners to make some…
