I recently emailed everyone who subscribes to my weekly tips a list of suggestions for ways to motivate team members to arrive on time to the daily scrum. For example, many teams have a rule that if…
Planning Poker relies on relative estimating, in which the item being estimated is compared to one or more previously estimated items. It is the ratio between items that is important. An item…
A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but a five-point story better not go by any other names. Or numbers. Here’s how to maintain consistency across estimates.
Most of the Scrum literature describes a situation in which a team is allowed to work without interruption. But that’s not realistic. Here’s how an interrupt-driven team can plan its…
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.
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…
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.
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…
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…
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…
