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.…
As I engage different teams I have noted a lack of clarity surrounding product backlog concepts. Although there is no universally accepted vocabulary for labeling product backlog-related things, there should at least be agreement on the basic concepts. The goal of this…
This blog is the sixth in a series about agile and risk management. The first five blogs are:
This blog is the fifth in a series about agile and risk management. The first four blogs are:
This blog is the fourth in a series about agile and risk management. The first three blogs are:
In this blog I discuss…
I get a lot of questions about speaking, including how I prepare, how I engage the audience, and so on. For example, in May 2014 I gave the opening keynote presentation at the Global Scrum Gathering in New Orleans. Immediately after I completed my speech (and…