The end of an agile sprint or iteration should be a relatively lightweight occasion. After all, it’s something that will be done at least once a month, and often much more frequently than that. So, it’s important that we don’t burden a team with any more process ceremony than necessary.…

…the foundational principles of agile and Scrum is a belief in the power of self-organizing teams. This makes a micromanaging boss, ScrumMaster or product owner a particularly difficult problem for agile teams. I’ve found asking three questions helpful in dealing with micromanagers. Who? The first question is Who? Who is…

…work. But when an agile team estimates product backlog items, the team doesn’t yet know who will work on each item. Teams will usually make that determination either during iteration (sprint) planning or in a more real-time manner in daily standups. This means the whole team should take part in…

…This poor implementation of agile teamwork creates a number of problems. First, it stretches the amount of time a feature is in development. If the feature will be shipped when done, this means time to market increases. Even if the feature won’t be shipped immediately, it now takes two sprints…

…a couple of iterations, agile teams have learned there is little value in adding detail to the story so far in advance. But the time comes in the life of any user story when adding detail is appropriate. And there are two ways a team can add detail to a…

An agile team should maintain a consistent sprint length. Unfortunately, when I first began doing iterative and incremental development (even a bit before doing what today we’d call agile development), I made the mistake of not having all of our sprints be the same length. We would meet at the…

…It’s hard to be agile with a team composed largely of amateurs. Amateurs tend to take the distinctly non-agile attitude of “that isn’t my job” and “I only do this type of work.” Amateurs are more likely to be highly specialized and to feel entitled to work solely within their…

…the same for an agile team during its sprint planning meeting. Identifying the major tasks necessary to get done is sufficient for deciding how many and which product backlog items can be brought into the sprint. Target Identifying About Two Thirds In my experience, good agile teams can successfully do…

…Them Understand the Boundaries Agile teams are told they are self organizing. But that doesn’t always mean the same thing in every organization. For example: Does the team have authority to add its own technical work into a sprint? Does the team have authority over who is on the team?…

…dramatically. Buffer Penetration An agile team can similarly track the use of a buffer allocated during sprint planning. Tracking buffer use, or buffer penetration, is helpful because it facilitates decision making about the use of the buffer. For example, suppose a team is on the fifth day of a ten-day…

When organizations scale agile, they’re faced with the challenge of managing multiple teams. And if you have multiple teams working on the same project, that coordination becomes more complex, particularly when creating estimates. The teams will need to estimate and plan, and then track progress against the plan so the…

…during the project. For agile teams, the pre-mortem is at the other end of the work from a sprint retrospective but it covers an overall project or initiative rather than a single iteration. This relationship to the iteration retrospective results in the meeting sometimes being called a futurespective or pre-spective.…

…most important meeting an agile team does each iteration. It’s also the meeting most teams wish they could skip. In this post I describe the four most common problems teams struggle with in their retrospectives. I then offer advice on overcoming each. 8. Are We Really Bad at Estimating? Humans…

…apple. Implementation Intentions and Agile Projects There are a couple of ways implementation intentions can support agile teams. They could be formed at the Scrum team’s sprint planning to help the team get to done such as: We will work on these two product backlog items first. We’ll finish this…

Every agile team needs to know how to create, use, and read story maps. Story maps can help teams and their product owners uncover user needs, find alternative ways of achieving user goals, help order the product backlog, communicate how features fit together, prioritize what the developers will work on…