Does it matter in what order a Scrum Team executes their Sprint Backlog?
Over the last few years I’ve had folks from various roles on agile teams ask me if I thought it was important if the stories in a sprint backlog were executed on in their rank order of importance, because "after all, the team made the commit…
Lean or Kanban or Agile
This post originally published by Mike Cottmeyer for Agile Chronicles, May 2009. Here I am.. Sunday afternoon.. Mother’s day. Just got back from taking the family out for a low key Mother’s day celebration and now I’ve got a little quiet time before …
The Agile Scaling Checklist
When I first read The Checklist Manifesto by Dr. Atul Gawande it got me thinking about a checklist that could be effective and easy to use by my clients to help determine if a change they were considering making to a policy, a procedure, an organi…
For What It’s Worth
I’ve used this theme before but I need to once again give my nods to Buffalo Springfield. It is absolutely time we "Stop Children, what’s that sound, everyone look whats going down…" I get involved in a heck of a lot of discussi…
Extreme Programming Values – Communication
Communication is one of the most underestimated of the XP values. The value of communication is not underestimated, so much as how hard it is. There are many different ways to believe we are truly communicating, but they so often fall short. When we are talking about software development, we have even more communications models […]
10 Years of Agile
Alistair Cockburn has been organizing a 10 Years of the Agile Manifesto event in Snowbird this coming weekend. A majority of the discussion is anticipated to revolve around three questions:What problems in software or product development have we s…
Making Distributed Agile Teams Work
When working with distributed agile teams, first we have to ask ourselves, "What is our definition of making distributed teams work?" I have managed and coached distributed agile teams that "make it work," however they underst…
The Extreme Programming Values – Alive and Well!
Like so many of my compatriots, I got started in the agile development world doing Extreme Programming. At first, I was enamored with the "engineering" practices such as Pair Programming and Refactoring. These practices have becom…
The Agile Project Manager
Agile and Scrum methodologies are helping software organizations stay competitive by delivering products more frequently and with significantly higher quality. Making the switch to agile development also challenges traditional notions of project manage…
I’m a Certified ScrumMaster. BFD.*
{ *Actually so is my brother, and he’s a freakin’ marketing guy… } While I believe that the ScrumMaster Certification program had a hand in driving the early adoption of agile methods over the past several years, I also believe that …