Scrum

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 development is simply too far out of their reach? A not so far-fetched example Let’s just imagine that we walk into...

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, I don’t usually have that luxury. And If I do, I don’t believe it!  The amount of stuff...

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) we’ll all have the opportunity to expose our own views and experiences and of course learn from fellow practitioners. Looking at all the position...

Like most of you, I’ve had my fair (or unfair) share of meetings.  Some were great and a lot of them were just ok. But a few weeks ago a colleagueof mine said something during a ROTI evaluation that forced me to look back at all those previous “great” meetings and re-evaluate their TRUE value. What he said was: “Am I my really obtaining value from this activity or am I just having a good time?” My jaw dropped! How can such a simple...

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 Product Owner Items in the Product Backlog are estimated and prioritized by an architect A Blackberry is the...

It feels good to have a common enemy, someone or something to hate or discredit. What this usually does is create a sense of unity between individuals who share a common view. We do this with programming languages (Java vs. .Net), philosophies (Waterfall vs. Agile) and even within those philosophies (Scrum vs. DSDM vs. Crystal vs. …). One of my preferred antagonists was the all mighty monolithic Project Management Institute...