…to become a more agile development organization, but you aren’t sure how to begin. You’ve heard of successful, non-agile transitions where a strong, visionary leader plants a stake in the ground and says, “Let's take our organization there.” You might have also been a part of change efforts that started…

…the problem of managing agile projects. A lot of early agile thinking was that the role of the manager was to buy pizza and get out of the way. This book shows how the role of the agile project manager goes well beyond that and provides very specific activities to…

…company has some great agile team members. If you're familiar with much of what I've written you'll definitely know Lisa Crispin, co-author of the Agile Testing book. Others will know Nanda Lankalapalli, one of the leading agilists in India. ePlan is also home to Lisa Owens, whom many in my…

…equivalent. A development team (agile or not) estimates that delivering a desired set of capabilities will take seven months with the available resources. Team members provide this estimate to their manager who passes the estimate along to a vice president who informs the client. And in some cases the estimate…

…these years, I'm as agile as can be, but that doesn't mean I don't see the need for project governance. The challenge is that a company's project governance and project management approaches need to be consistent. For example, if Mountain Goat got big enough that someone could start, say a…

…of life for many agile projects and are a particularly difficult agile project management challenge. The reality is that even when teams cannot be collocated, individual team members need to meet each other face to face. If the whole team cannot get together, one or two members from each team,…

…and coauthor of the Agile Manifesto, has told me that “the real low-hanging fruit is often not automating some test execution but automating other testing tasks, like populating databases or automatic navigation to the page where you’ll start manual testing. You’re not reducing the number of manual tests, but you’re…

…before the ascendancy of agile methodologies like Scrum, we knew we should automate our tests. But we didn’t. Automated tests were considered expensive to write and were often written months, or in some cases years, after a feature had been programmed. One reason teams found it difficult to write tests…

…is critical to successful agile teamwork, the formation of self-organizing communities of practice creates a powerful synergy. In this sense it is up to the organization and its leadership to create an environment in which communities of practice can form, flourish, and then fade away as they run their course.…

…through their transition to agile. Part of that job entailed hiring and contracting with some experienced Scrum Masters to help those within the company who were moving into the role. Pat was one of the experienced Scrum Masters we hired. A couple of months after hiring him, the senior vice…

Mountain Goat Software client High Moon Studios has been recognized as one of IT Week Magazine's Top 50 Technology Innovators of 2005. See the full article for details.

…this is OK. Standard agile advice is that a team should work on product backlog items in the order prescribed by the product owner. And although this is somewhat reasonable advice, I want to argue that good agile teams violate that guideline all the time. There are many good reasons…

…well look at an agile product backlog template in Excel. As you probably know, I'm a big fan of writing the product backlog in the form of user stories and of writing user stories in the form: “As a _____, I ______, so that _______.” An example being: “As a…

…write about a new agile project management technique only after I’ve used it for a couple of years and found it successful in a couple of different contexts. In this post I want to share such a technique. It’s a statistical technique called “resampling” that I’ve become quite fond of…

…because mountain goats are agile. The answer to that is a bit yes and a bit no. The company was formed in 1992, long before “agile” was a term commonly applied to software development. We started the company to do outsourced contract development and the name was picked from a…