A product owner hands 10 story cards to the team. The team reads them and hands the fifth and sixth cards back to the product owner. By the end of the sprint, the team delivers the functionality…
Of course, the answer is the whole team – that collective of ScrumMaster plus product owner plus team members such as programmers, testers, designers, DBAs, analysts and so on. But what if that…
I have a bit of a problem with all the hatred shown to so-called vanity metrics.
Eric Ries first defined vanity metrics in his landmark book, The Lean Startup. Ries says...
Scrum, like all of the agile processes, is both iterative and incremental. Since these words are used so frequently without definition, let’s define them. An iterative process is one that makes…
There are two primary ways for planning a sprint: velocity-driven sprint planning and commitment-driven sprint planning. In last week’s post, I described velocity-driven planning; so in this…
There are two general approaches to planning sprints: velocity-driven planning and capacity-driven planning. Over the next three posts, I will describe each approach, and make my case for the one I…
Agile teams build high-quality products. Agile team members write high-quality code. Agile teams produce functionality quickly by not sacrificing quality. Each of these is something I’ve said…
In case you haven’t noticed, a few months ago we launched Front Row Agile, a site dedicated to video training courses on agile and Scrum. This has placed me in the role of product owner for the…
If story points are an estimate of the time (effort) involved in doing something, why not just estimate directly in hours or days? Why use points at all? There are multiple good reasons to estimate…
Story points are about time. There, I’ve said it, and can’t be more clear than that. I’ve written previously about why story points are about effort, not complexity. But I want to…
