The Mountain Goat Software Blog

Ahh, it's fall. Not only does it bring the return of great, cooler weather but it...

An organization's Wise Architects often provide requirements to a team in the form of non-functional requirements.

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

See why planning and estimating still matter for maximizing value in agile work.

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

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.

Use actual effort data to see whether a team’s story point scale stays consistent across story sizes.

Protect teams from outside pressure and from patterns that hurt their own work.

Get a practical spreadsheet format for keeping a product backlog visible and usable.

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

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

Avoid false precision when estimating business value on small backlog items.

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