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#129: 2025: The Year Agile Meets AI and Hyper-Personalization with Lance Dacy
https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/agile/podcast/129-2025-the-year-agile-meets-ai-and-hyper-personalization-with-lance-dacy…got a couple of points to make on this. But for the first time ever in human history, we now have something that might be more intelligent than us. And that is scary because there's some AI neural network engines that people can't explain how it's working anymore. They put… -
Getting Better Estimates Is Easier Than You Think
https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/are-we-really-bad-at-estimating…theory behind estimating with story points, if you don’t account for human nature and personality dynamics, you can still encounter problems. I’m not saying your team members are problem people; I’m sure they’re awesome. It’s just that people bring baggage and preconceived notions to the estimation process. How People Problems… -
Alternative Release Burndown Chart
https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/agile/scrum/scrum-tools/release-burndown/alternative…progress of 40 hours, points (or whatever) last sprint, but the burndown chart only shows net progress of 10. Was the team slower than expected, or was more work added to the release? It's important to know the answer to this question, because we cannot really predict when the release… -
Agile Teams: Concurrent Engineering & Overlapping Work
https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/the-importance-of-overlapping-work-in-agile…working on a user story, “As a user, I am logged out after n minutes of inactivity.” Before that story can be considered complete, someone is going to need to decide how long n is—30 minutes? 12 hours? But, someone could absolutely begin work on that story without the answer.… -
#116: Turning Weird User Actions into Big Wins with Gojko Adzic
https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/agile/podcast/116-turning-weird-user-actions-into-big-wins-with-gojko-adzic…it. There's a wonderful story about this in… Founders at work a book by Jessica Livingston and she talks about this kind of group of super smart people in late 90s who Came up with a very very efficient Cryptography algorithm and a way to compute the cryptography so they… -
#156: Making Product Ownership Work in Shared Services with Kert Peterson
https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/agile/podcast/156-making-product-ownership-work-in-shared-services-with-kert-peterson…one of the friction points here in shared services is you've got these demands coming at you. all day, every day from all these different corners and from everyone, it's urgent. From everyone, this is the most important thing. So how can you apply some of this product ownership mindset… -
Overheard During a Customer Conversation About Estimates
https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/overheard-during-customer-conversation-about-estimates…a gross estimating approach (story points). A pull-based system sounds nice, but it doesn’t sound like it’s going to give me a better sense of what we can accomplish in a sprint. Your velocity is somewhat stabilizing, but you’re still committing to more work in Sprint Planning than you can… -
Predicting Velocity When Teams Change Frequently
https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/predicting-velocity-when-teams-change-frequently…average velocity of 25 points per iteration over the last year and they have time for 8 iterations in this new project; therefore they will complete around 200 points in those 8 iterations.” But what do we do when we are managing an agile project where team membership or size… -
#103: Developer Relations and SQLMesh with Marisa Smith
https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/agile/podcast/103-developer-relations-and-sqlmesh-with-marisa-smith…of the big friction points between the business side and the developer side is take SQLMesh. If that's something that my team has never worked with and I have someone on the team who is interested in that and wants to, thinks it might give us some benefits, There's friction… -
#114: Is Agile Dead? with Scott Dunn
https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/agile/podcast/114-is-agile-dead-with-scott-dunn…we already know that story. whole reason, for those listening, consider this, whole reason Agile took off was the option A wasn't working and very clearly wasn't working for complex projects like software. Now for this person to come and recommend XYZ, of course, not surprising for all the listeners… -
Three Approaches to Estimating the Impact of Holidays and Time Off on Velocity
https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/three-approaches-to-estimating-impact-of-holidays-and-time-off-on-velocity…between 100 and 120 story points.” Such statements are based on a team knowing its velocity (perhaps as a single, averaged value but even better as a range). How to Account for Time Off & Holidays in Long-Term Plans But how should a team estimate its future velocity when team… -
Product Backlog Refinement
https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/product-backlog-refinement-grooming…team might split the story in order to create small enough pieces to fit inside one sprint. A team that does agile estimating with story points will also add estimates to any new or split stories that are bubbling up in priority. Why Refine the Product Backlog? By asking questions… -
Three Questions to Ask when Being Micromanaged
https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/three-questions-to-ask-when-being-micromanaged…most frequently at certain points within a sprint, note the number of days into the sprint when the micromanaging occurred. For example “Day 3” or perhaps “7 / 10” to indicate it occurred on day seven of a ten-day sprint. Time: Note the time of day when the micromanaging occurred… -
Sprint Planning Meeting
https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/agile/scrum/meetings/sprint-planning-meeting…has requested. By contrast, story-writing workshops are when the product owner, stakeholders, and team brainstorm what functionality the customer needs most. By the end of sprint planning, the team selects how much work they can do in the coming sprint. The product owner does not get to say, “We have… -
In Defense of Large Numbers
https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/in-defense-of-large-numbers…people to estimate with story points as large as 20, 40, and 100. We include these values in the decks of Planning Poker cards that we sell and give away in classes and at conferences. Yet many people tell me they start out my taking the 20, 40 and 100…
We found 118 results for story points