Applying Agile Beyond Software Development Agile can be applied well beyond software development. It’s been used for construction, planning …
Ray Bradbury on the Benefits of Short Releases In 2001, author Ray Bradbury gave a talk at the annual Writer’s Symposium by the Sea in San Diego. …
Simplify Prioritization into “Now” and “Not Now” I think I’d like to buy a big-screen plasma television. And maybe after that, a new amplifier for …
4 Reasons to Include Developers in Story Writing Participants in my Certified ScrumMaster courses are often surprised when I recommend that …
Building a Product Users Want: From Idea to Backlog with the Vision Board Vision and Backlog Scrum is a great framework for building a product with the right features. It …
Using Vertical Slicing and Estimation to Make Business Decisions at Adobe I recently helped to facilitate a two-day planning session for an important initiative at Adobe …
How to Be Sure You’ve Thought of Everything A common question I get is how can a product owner (or team) be sure they've thought...
Two Examples of Splitting Epics A Scrum trainer recently asked for a couple of good, real examples of large user stories (epics) …
Introduction to User Stories The technique of expressing requirements as user stories is one of the most broadly applicable …
Presentation for Product Owners: Storytelling with the Prioritized Product Backlog The vast majority of what has been written about agile processes is intended for programmers and …
Rapid Feedback and the America’s Cup Getting close to their customer and using rapid feedback cycles led to Team New Zealand winning the …
Agile Teamwork High-performing Scrum teams have learned to do a little bit of everything during a sprint, thereby …
Agile Product Management with Scrum As a project management framework, Scrum introduces many changes. One of the biggest is the role of …
Separate Estimating from Committing Remember the difference between an estimate and a commitment and keep the two activities separate, …
How To Fail With Agile Not everyone involved in an agile transition wants the change to be successful. This …
The Chivalrous Team Member In seeking to improve how we develop software, we continually inspect and adapt. While thinking …
Do Products Owners Evolve As a Species? What my friend had found is that his product owners had evolved in adaptation to their environment, …
Should Companies Measure Productivity in Story Points / Ideal Days? One measure we may want to include in our suite of metrics could be the responsiveness of the …
Writing Contracts for Agile Development User stories are a great way to get people talking about requirements. However, there's a reason …
The Certainty of Uncertainty If the only certain things in life are death and taxes, why do so many teams think that if they …
The Role of Learning and Expected Cost of Change An academic paper that describes the importance of using more than just the vaguely defined …
Incorporating Learning and Expected Cost of Change An experience report presented at XP2006 covering why it is not as simple as telling product owners …
Change Is Good…Or is It? Change may be a constant, but it doesn't have to be constant. By following some simple guidelines, …
Scrum Shouldn’t Be a Burden Scrum was designed to be lightweight, so if your team is complaining that it's too heavy, you need …
Selecting the Right Iteration Length A key consideration in adopting an iterative process is selecting how long your iterations will be. …
I Didn’t Know I Needed That! Products that do everything they're supposed to do and offer consumers something they like, but …
Distance Remaining Is More Important than Distance Covered With no land in sight to guide them, it would have been all too easy for early sailors to get lost …
Stop Listening to Your Users Users are often kept at arm's length. We ask them for their input on the design, but then we, as …
Writing User Stories - Questioning Your Users Let's face it, most people don't know what they want. Most of us just
Want Better Software? Just Ask This article presents very specific advice on seven things a product owner or customer can do to …
Introducing An Agile Process to an Organization The transition from a plan-driven to an agile process affects not only the development team …
Configuration Bugs that Bite Over the years we've come up with many useful database development techniques. This article …
The Need for Agile Project Management Ken Schwaber and I co-wrote this article to help counter the misperception that agile projects do …
The Upside of Downsizing This article describes how a project was successfully downsized from 100 to 12 developers. To make …
4 Metrics to Support Project Estimates This article describes some very useful metrics that are probably worth collecting on any project.