Mountain Goat Software

Summarizing the Results of a Sprint

Although you may wish it weren’t the case, some Scrum Masters need to document how a sprint went. Here’s advice on how to do that in a lightweight, agile manner.

Teams Don’t Need to Think of Everything During Sprint Planning

A couple of weeks ago, I participated in a painful sprint planning meeting. You might have been in the same type of meeting. The team was going to great lengths to identify every task they'd need…

Advice on How to Split Reporting User Stories

Splitting stories has long been one of the biggest challenges facing agile teams. Here are some examples of splitting some reporting stories to demonstrate ways of splitting stories.

Applying Agile Beyond Software Development

Agile can be applied well beyond software development. It’s been used for construction, planning weddings, marketing and more. These are my thoughts on how agile could have saved a hotel chain…

Should Scrum Teams Include a Stretch Goal In Their Sprints?

There are, of course, a variety of ways to go about planning a sprint. I’ve written previously about velocity-driven sprint planning and capacity-driven sprint planning and my preference. But…

A Simple Way to Run a Sprint Retrospective

There are many ways you can run a sprint retrospective. Here’s the simplest way and still my favorite.

Does a Scrum Team Need a Retrospective Every Sprint?

Conventional wisdom says that a team should do a retrospective every sprint. But if your sprints are one week, can you do them every few sprints? That would still be more often than a team doing…

Can a Traditional SRS Be Converted into User Stories?

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…

21 New Year’s Resolutions for Scrum Masters

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…

Does Being a Scrum Master Get Easier Over Time?

Being the Scrum Master of a Scrum team can be hard work. But does it get harder over time? Or easier?

Should You Use Zero-Point Estimates on Your Product Backlog?

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.…

Leave Work Unassigned and See Who Steps Forward

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…

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