My wife, daughters and I use Wunderlist to manage our shared grocery list. Any time one of us notices something we're out of, that person adds it to the grocery list. Then, whoever is taking their…
Interviewing Scrum Masters can be difficult because the job is harder than most to turn into a checklist of things a candidate needs to know and things a candidate will do. Much of the interviewing…
In last week’s post, I wrote about how to integrate UI designers into the agile sprint. I said that designers should work as part of the team on the current sprint but should spend some of their…
A question I’ve been getting a lot lately is whether UI designers should be part of the Scrum team and whether they should do their work as part of an agile sprint. It’s a big topic. So…
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…
