Budget When You Can’t Estimate I've written before that we should only estimate if having the estimate will change someone's …
An Iterative Waterfall Isn’t Agile I’ve noticed something disturbing over the past two years. And it’s occurred uniformly with teams …
Are 64% of Features Really Rarely or Never Used? A very oft-cited metric is that 64 percent of features in products are “rarely or never used.” The …
Estimates on Split Stories Do Not Need to Equal the Original It is good practice to first write large user stories (commonly known as epics) and then to split …
Not Everything Needs to Be a User Story: Using FDD Features User stories are great. When you’ve got users, that is. Sometimes, though, the users of a system or …
It’s Summer, Find Something to Celebrate It’s July—find something to celebrate with your team. Unless your “down under,” you’re probably …
Prioritize and Optimize Over a Slightly Longer Horizon A lot of agile literature stresses that product owners must prioritize the delivery of value. I’m …
Can a Product Owner Dictate the Architecture? In general, a Scrum product owner's job is to specify what to build, not how to build it. Read this …
Holacracy and the Search for Agile Organization I met Brian Robertson back when he was still the CEO of Ternary Software and experimenting with the …
Product Backlog Refinement Learn about product backlog refinement: how, when, and why the agile team and product owner refine …
Impostor Syndrome: Why Some ScrumMasters Feel Like They’re Faking It Geoff Watts is one of the leading Scrum thinkers in the world, and one of the few to hold both the …
Getting Comfortable with Not Signing Up for Tasks in Sprint Planning In last week’s blog post, I wrote about whether team members should sign up for tasks during sprint …