A lot of traditionally managed projects begin with a Software Requirements Specification (SRS). Then sometime during the project, a decision is made to adopt an agile approach. And so a natural…
As we come up on the end of the year, it's time to make some New Year's resolutions. Since one of my resolutions for this year was to provide useful and actionable advice, and since I know…
I'm occasionally asked about the merits (and whether there are any) of putting an estimate of zero on user stories. You may have noticed that our decks of Planning Poker cards include a zero card.…
Early in my career, I noticed the project managers in my company drove nicer cars than we programmers did. (This was back before companies had learned to fully value their technical staff.) After a…
My wife, daughters and I use Wunderlist to manage our shared grocery list. Any time one of us notices something we're out of, that person adds it to the grocery list. Then, whoever is taking their…
Interviewing Scrum Masters can be difficult because the job is harder than most to turn into a checklist of things a candidate needs to know and things a candidate will do. Much of the interviewing…
In last week’s post, I wrote about how to integrate UI designers into the agile sprint. I said that designers should work as part of the team on the current sprint but should spend some of their…
A question I’ve been getting a lot lately is whether UI designers should be part of the Scrum team and whether they should do their work as part of an agile sprint. It’s a big topic. So…
Agile teams are told to “embrace change,” which is the subtitle to Kent Beck’s wonderful Extreme Programming Explained book. Although an agile team can embrace change, the…
It’s quite common for a team to have a bit of unfinished work at the end of an agile sprint or iteration. Ideally, a team would finish every item on its sprint backlog every sprint. But, for a…
Over the past few months, I've read a few books on marketing. But I've also taken a handful of video training courses on marketing and have been listening to some enjoyable podcasts on the…
