Category: Agile
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Agile 2010 Conference – Day 1
I went to my first Agile Conference! I guess I’m always a bit uneasy when I’m surrounded by people who more or less think the same way I do. On the other hand, it feels great! It’s a stark contrast from what I’m used to – you know, being surrounded by Architects, DBAs, PMOs and…
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Watching the garden grow…
I had the rare delight today of participating in an Agile lunch and learn at a client’s site. There have been a series of successful lunch and learns there over the past several months, but this one was different in many ways. An Agile lunch and learn attended by a few dozen people, despite the…
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Playing to Learn
Learning can be fun. Heck, let’s just get straight to the point and state unequivocally that learning should be fun, dammit! Learning through play is also a powerfully effective way for people of all ages to acquire and accumulate new concepts and practices. Current neuroscience suggests that using a variety of approaches to concretize ideas…
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Agile Coaching – Maybe all you can do is send a Hallmark card
As agile coaches helping organizations transition to a different way of doing things, are we doing a disservice to our clients by accepting a mandate that we know deep down will most certainly fail? Are we failing to recognize the fact that any attempt for a particular client to adopt an agile approach to software…
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The Agile Coach’s Charter
As an Agile Coach, I commit to… Never apply recipes Respect your distinct culture Help you challenge your current culture, principles and practices Let you learn from your mistakes Not let you make irrecoverable mistakes Help put in place an empirical process that allows learning Allow you to evolve within that empirical process Allow the…
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The so-called polluted Product Backlog
Warning: The following post might provoke a mild aneurism to some scrum purists. Don’t you love a nice, clean and deep Product Backlog, filled only with strong user stories tightly linked to clear business objectives and estimated by business value and story points? As an Agile coach working with large organization with even larger challenges,…
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Agile Coach Camp Canada – Any suggestions?
It’s almost T-minus zero for the 2010 Agile Coach Camp! This open space forum for Agile coaches will be held on June 11th and 12th in Waterloo Canada and will be a great opportunity to see how our profession is evolving and practiced in the field. Being in an open space format (which I love)…
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10 signs that the collaboration between a Product Owner and a development team is defective
No one knows who the Product owner is Tasks in Sprint Backlog are dictated by the Product Owner The team’s default behaviour is to assume what the Product Owner wants The Product Owner doesn’t understand that great new feature presented during the Sprint Review All features presented during the Sprint Review are refused by the…
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An Agile Marketing Plan
The ScrumMaster is one busy bee! If the team is less than fully self-organized, her plate can be quite full. If the organization is less than Agile, there isn’t a “Certified ScrumMaster shovel” big enough to handle all the issues that arise. Every day, she tries to improve the development team’s engineering practices, productivity and…