…of an organization’s becoming agile is finding the appropriate balance between anticipation and adaptation, as Jim Highsmith wrote in Agile Software Development Ecosystems. The following figure shows this balance along with activities and artifacts that influence the balance. When doing up-front analysis or design, we are attempting to anticipate users’…

…Mountain Goat provided training to Farm Credit on Scrum, Agile Estimating and Planning, and User Stories. Congratulations to Farm Credit Services of America and all of their agile employees for achieving such outstanding results.

Mountain Goat Software client Salesforce.com successfully completed one of the quickest, large-scale, big-bang agile transitions ever, involving over 200 developers. At the Agile 2007 conference they shared this presentation on how they did it.

Agile teams build high-quality products. Agile team members write high-quality code. Agile teams produce functionality quickly by not sacrificing quality. Each of these is something I’ve said before. And if you haven’t said these exact things, you’ve likely said something similar. Quality gets mentioned a lot in discussions about agile.…

…1 of Succeeding with Agile summarizes of the published research on the benefits of adopting an agile process. I created a presentation based on that research. The presentation is available in Keynote and PowerPoint format and is released under a Creative Commons license with the hope that others will use…

…the early days of agile. 4. Needs, Wants, and Wishes on Your Product Backlog I’ve never been a fan of separating requirements into must-have, should-have, could-have, and won’t-have categories. Out of all the times I’ve seen that, I could probably count on one hand the instances when could-have items end…

…so many in the agile community. I highly recommend the book (full, belated review forthcoming on the website). I'm surprised at its reception among agilists because a central tenet of the book is actionable metrics and I've met too many people in the agile community who have been opposed to…

…value our work as agile coaches and consultants? The way I do it is to ask myself if I will have had a positive long-term impact on a team or organization. I’m not particularly interested in short-term impacts. In fact, many coaching engagements could have a negative impact in the…

…before the world discovered agile, prioritizing bug fixes was a challenge in software development. But agile’s short iterations make it even harder for many teams to decide which bugs to fix and which to put off. The good news is, an agile team typically has far fewer bug fixes to…

…as facilitators, Scrum Masters, agile coaches, product owners, and others often need to help teams achieve consensus. This could be a product owner getting a group of stakeholders to agree on a significant objective for the coming period. Or it could be a Scrum Master wrapping up a retrospective and…

…problem sounds familiar: Your agile team runs a series of sprints, always doing the highest priority work as chosen by your product owner. But after that series of sprints, you look back at what the team accomplished. And it’s not very satisfying. All the team seemed to do was move…

As an agile framework, Scrum is deceptively simple. Yet those who implement it successfully know that simple doesn’t always mean easy. To help you on your agile journey, I have created an introductory Scrum Foundations video course. This series of short videos introduces you to the terminology and concepts associated…

…organization’s moving to an agile way of working, and that means these project managers may have to do something entirely different. Often they become either a product owner or a Scrum Master. Certification is not new to these individuals. Some of them have already earned their project management certification (vs…

…safe approach. Nowadays most agile teams have moved toward shorter sprints. The unintended consequence is that organizations have turned Scrum into a check-the-boxes process. If team members have finished all the items they said they would, the team is successful. . .but if they have not, they’ve failed. (This tendency…

…“best of” from the Agile Mentors Community’s monthly coaching calls. Overview Twice a month, there is an open Q&A session we offer as part of the Agile Mentors Community where anyone from the community can join in and ask either Mike or Brian questions. These are open discussions and allow…