One of the biggest mistakes that I see new Agile teams (or teams at scale) do is moving too quickly into a different format to do a retrospective. It isn’t too surprising when you see that there are so many different ways to do a retrospective, after all, if there are that many options then …
What if the characters from Game of Thrones happened to be Product Owners? How would their personas come to live in Agile teams? Let’s see how some of our favourite characters as Agile Product Owners. Arya Stark – Stick bad ideas with the pointy end This is a PO take on Arya’s statement “Stick em’ …
There is a world of misinformation out there about Agile. Even I have probably created some misinformation once or twice (not deliberately). There is probably too much wrong to fix, but I saw a tweet recently that I wanted to tackle. It was originally linking to the Segue Technologies blog: http://www.seguetech.com/blog/2015/11/03/waterfall-vs-agile-infographic Naturally some people in the …
In a query that recently spammed the Agile universe by Abder-Rahman Ali was a question posed about the difference between User Stories and Software Requirements Specifications, specifically 1) Do you think that “user story” is just a fancy name for SRS? 2) How do you compare a “user story” to “SRS”? 3) Do you think that …
In a recent tweet, If you must do some pre-project prep, so be it. Please don’t name it “Sprint 0” that makes it seem valuable. It isn’t. Delving further into the tweet I learned that “many use Sprint 0 to enable bad habits” (don’t disagree), that it maybe should be called “project chartering” instead and …
A little while ago in a private Agile forum I saw a post by a person who was very frustrated with Agile. Their main concern was over the manifesto value “Working software over comprehensive documentation”. The scenario that they presented was one, where as a Product Owner, they wanted to understand a few of the …
As part of my back to basics series I wanted to spend some time on the topic of Retrospectives, otherwise known as Introspection or Reflective Improvement sessions. If the Stand-up is the bread, then the Retrospective is the butter. It is simply just one of the most fundamental elements of doing/being Agile there is. Alike …
Can them what you will – Daily Scrum, a Huddle or a Stand-up, but whatever you call it a Stand-up is one of the simplest Agile (and arguably knowledge and service management) practices out there. Three questions are answered by the “core team”: What I’ve done since we last met… What I plan on doing till …
I have been pondering lately what the purpose of a Scrum Master or Iteration Manager is. Many believe that it is a 100% full time role. Some are even concerned that there are formal positions springing up for this role. Here is my stance (and work in progress model) on the role: The purpose of …
Agile Forest 