__Agile Estimating and Planning__ is the definitive, practical guide to estimating and planning agile projects. In the book, ScrumMaster and CST Mike Cohn discusses the philosophy of agile estimating and planning and shows you exactly how to get the job done with real-world examples and case studies.

…but actionable understanding of agile, this course is for you. After just one day, you’ll have the confidence and knowledge you need to start embracing agile practices such as iterative development, customer collaboration and adapting to change. Find out when places are available Join the Waitlist This one day course…

…help implement and spread agile project management across the organization. However, when the PMO is not properly involved, it can be a source of resistance as it tries to defend the current process, rather than improve it. The natural response of most people in the PMO is to resist the…

The agile process favors an incremental, just-in-time approach to design. As such, Scrum projects do not have an upfront analysis or design phase; all work occurs within the repeated cycle of sprints. This does not mean, however, that design on a Scrum project is not intentional. An intentional design process…

…to work in an agile manner. Categorizing how individuals resist is even simpler: Is the resistance active or passive? Active resistance occurs when someone takes a specific action intended to impede or derail the transition to Scrum. Passive resistance occurs when someone fails to take a specific action, usually after…

…been. We've definitely seen agile project management methodologies cross over and become of interest to mainstream organizations. Even better, agile is definitely viewed as a viable alternative to heavier weight processes. Three years ago I used to get a lot of calls for consulting work that started with, “Can you…

…taskboard to make the agile defects and bug fixing visible, and to track it. In these situations, a common question is whether the team should assign some number of story points to the work of fixing these legacy bugs. If the team does not assign a story point value to…

An issue facing many agile teams is how they can coexist with non-agile teams within the same company and often working on the same project. A friend, Eva Gysling, is doing some academic research into this topic. She's prepared an 11-topic free-form questionnaire soliciting experiences and thoughts on mixing agile…

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 stakeholders in an organization must understand that change is not always free. Most agile teams seems to understand this. They get that requirements…

…to Scrum or even agile, each has been a big part of my success with agile. For each lesson, I’ll share what I learned and tell a brief story of how I learned it. In doing so, I'm hoping to help you avoid the mistakes I made before these lessons…

…yet bought into an agile way of working (or has some baggage from flawed implementations of agile in the past). I’ll talk about the easy fix first: the meetings themselves (aka Scrum events or Scrum activities). Then I’ll address the deeper concerns that might be hiding behind complaints of too…

…drive out of your agile process or your agile adoption? Would you drive out someone forcing you to standardize things that don’t need to be standardized? I once worked in an organization that had mandated all daily scrums for all teams had to happen between 9:00 A.M. and 10:00 A.M.…

…often do, even with agile—managers search their bag of tricks for a solution. All too often, the solution they pick is the solution that was used on them before they became managers: Overtime. The problem is, overtime didn’t work then, and it won’t work now. Four Things to Try When…

…working on my first agile teams. Sprint Planning on Early Teams On my early agile projects, team members signed up for tasks during the sprint planning meeting. We would leave a planning meeting with someone’s name associated with each task. Our sprint backlog, which we called a sprint plan back…