A common agile project management question is whether bugs belong on the product backlog. Before I address that question, let me clarify that the question refers to bugs that are unrelated to functionality being coded during the sprint. If someone finds a bug during a sprint that is related to…

…think about the new agile certification from the Project Management Institute (PMI). A recent trip to New York City helped clarify my thinking on this. I was in New York with my wife and daughters for spring break and doing the tourist thing. I'd live in NYC for a couple…

…the why-we-do-what-we-do portion of agile. Without a good set of principles and values, people will often flail because they lack a clear understanding of the why, the meaning behind the practices. Common indicators of a failure to grasp the principles behind the agile activities include: The team holding weekly “standup”…

…each is during an agile estimating meeting. First, of course, we start with the team. All of a Scrum team’s members should be present when playing Planning Poker. You may be tempted to estimate without the individuals in some role—don’t. An estimate put on a product backlog item (most frequently…

…that statement on the Agile Manifesto. It is perhaps the most important of the Manifesto’s four value statements—working software is, after all, the reason a team has undertaken a software development effort. It is also one of the most misused parts of the Manifesto. This is the quote people cite…

…best approach when an agile team is asked to estimate work they don't think they can reasonably estimate. But let's start with some of the reasons why an agile team may not be able to estimate well. Why a Team Might Not Be Able to Estimate Well This might occur…

…the end of an agile sprint or iteration. Ideally, a team would finish every item on its sprint backlog every sprint. But, for a variety of reasons, that isn’t always the case. This leads to a couple of questions I’ll address here: What should be done with the product backlog…

…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 time (perhaps even most of it) looking ahead at what is coming next. But this raises a concern I’d like to address in…

…for the majority of agile teams—those that are only interrupted a moderate amount. Some teams, however, are highly interrupt-driven. Again, I want to resist putting actual percentages on the regions in Figure 1, but I’m describing a situation in which the area of “unplanned time” becomes much larger than shown.…

…their first steps with agile help them learn, evaluate and adopt new practices. It is perhaps comparable to learning a new language. At first we learn through memorization. Later, when we know enough to begin conversing in the new language, we can also learn through context: One word in a…

If you’ve ever done agile estimating with story points or used Planning Poker®, you may have used either the Fibonacci sequence or a modified Fibonacci sequence. The traditional Fibonacci series is 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55 and so on. Each number is the sum of the…

…year from now. You’re agile, so you might release every couple of weeks if that’s appropriate for your customers and the product. But the big deadline—the one everyone is focused on—is a year away. And, let’s suppose you’re on schedule. It’s not going to be easy, but the general feeling…

We say agile teams are self-organizing. But how far does that go? Should team members have the right to vote someone off the team? Since the debut of the Survivor television show back in 1997, this is often referred to by asking if a team has the right to vote…

…one strategy a good agile coach will teach. A coach keeps your team open to new perspectives and making progress. Here’s a place to start: ask whether the teams are working on the same product. If these teams are working on independent products, there may be no need to combine…

…a user story in agile?” “Can you give me some epic, feature, and user story examples?” “Can you tell me how to write epics, features and user stories?”. “Epics? User Stories? What's the Difference?” So in this article, let’s cover some basic—but very helpful—territory by explaining some user story–related language.…