Every nonfunctional requirement you have is a candidate for inclusion in your definition of done. Let me explain why.
I’ll start by revisiting a few key terms and concepts. As you might recall, the result of each sprint should be a potentially…
Do you believe that agile can be applied to the development of non-software products? Well it can! Take Wikispeed, for instance, which builds a street-legal car every sprint. This one example alone should be enough to convince you that agile outside of software…
“Date, scope, and budget; choose any two!” I have heard that saying countless times—but it’s not precisely true.
It’s accurate to say that you can’t lock down all three variables on any interesting project/product-development effort and expect to succeed. Companies…
Years ago I used a slide in my training class that said, “For an organization to be successful with Scrum, it needs to have a safe environment.”
I remember in one class, a few guys at the back of the room start laughing when I showed that slide. When I asked why,…
Back in January, Ronnie Andrews Jr., host of the popular podcast All Things Agile, interviewed me about key concepts from my Essential Scrum book. Our conversation touched on many interesting topics, including the…
In the VersionOne 9th Annual State of the Agile Survey, 56 percent of the respondents cited “the ability to manage changing priorities” as a reason for adopting agile. That doesn’t surprise me at all, since more traditional forms of development are quite fragile to…
Agile development teams are cross-functionally diverse and sufficient. They are comprised of team members that collectively have the skills to get the job done. But how do teams deal with the variability of the work they are asked to do from sprint to sprint? For…
In the mid-1990s I was hired as an executive (director level) into IBM. My group was a services group chartered with developing solutions using object technology for IBM’s clients. During my tenure, we grew to have about 150 people in the group. IBM insisted that we hire…
Growing up I used to watch reruns of the TV show Hogan’s Heroes, a comedy about a fictional Nazi P.O.W. camp (Stalag 13) that houses prisoners who assist the Allied war effort from within the camp.
In Season 2, Episode 8, “A Klink, a Bomb, and Short Fuse,” an unexploded…
One team, one product, one product backlog. Release planning on that scale is simple! Let’s see why. Take a hypothetical project where we estimate about 200 points worth of work in our product backlog. Assume that our team’s average velocity is 20 points per sprint.…