Advantages of User Stories over Requirements and Use Cases At the surface, user stories appear to have much in common with use cases and traditional …
Choosing to Start Small or Go All In when Adopting Agile When it comes to transitioning to agile a lot of companies wonder whether it is best to start small …
The Roles of the Project Management Office in Scrum A project management office (PMO) that is engaged in and supportive of transitioning to Scrum can …
The Art of Compromise The concepts of agility and project governance are not fundamentally opposed. Each is an attempt to …
Rolling Lookahead Planning Rolling lookahead planning is a useful technique for large projects or any project with external …
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 …
Writing the Product Backlog Just in Time and Just Enough This article addresses the issue of how much detail should be included in product backlog items and …
Patterns of Agile Adoption There are many ways to transition to an agile process. Choosing the approach that is most likely to …
Advice on Conducting the Scrum of Scrums Meeting The scrum of scrums meeting is an important technique in scaling Scrum to large project teams. …
ScrumMaster: Appointed or Team-Selected? The selection of a new Scrum team’s ScrumMaster can impact the success or failure of the team's …
Writing Contracts for Agile Development User stories are a great way to get people talking about requirements. However, there's a reason …
Metrics You Can Bet On Numbers may not lie, but measurements can sure mislead you. This article explores two myths about …
Sprint Planning Many teams try to divide and conquer when it comes to sprint planning, often with disjointed and …
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 …
Put a Tough Decision in Its Place Are you shirking your decision-making responsibility? It happens more often than you think, and …
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 …
Estimating With Use Case Points Too much work goes into use cases to not employ them to their full potential. By assigning points …
Do It Yourself Projects fail for a plethora of reasons; one article could not hope to address all of them. …
The Dark Side of Multitasking Multitasking makes us feel more productive, but in truth trying to take on more than two tasks …
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 …
A Regular Heartbeat We all crave regularity. We want a steady rhythm and a strong downbeat so we know the steps we need …
What’s Holding You Back? I was honored to be the guest editor of a special issue of Better Software magazine that was …
Writing User Stories - Questioning Your Users Let's face it, most people don't know what they want. Most of us just
Toward a Catalog of Scrum Smells This article was written for the Scrum Alliance soapbox. It presents an initial collection of Scrum …
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.