834 views
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Storytellers and Prognosticators: Lessons in Communication Style
I tried to come up with different personas for the different types of communicators on my team. So far, I've broken the communication styles down into these general personas:
1094 views
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The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Backlog
The product backlog is an important tool: It lists ideas, requirements, and new insights. But is it always the right tool to use? This post discusses the strengths of a traditional product backlog together with its limitations. It provides advice on when to use the backlog, and when other tools may be better suited.
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A Sacrifice to the Agile Gods
The role that Scrum left behind: The manager. That’s the classic team manager, the one who is responsible for her team, from the view point of the organization. You remember her, right? Usually, team leaders get promoted by being the best at what they do, usually develop software.
313 views
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Scrum, Anime style...
A fun infographic made by a Scrum practitioner who was probably bored. It's a fun and simple infographic to make non-agile folks understand it.
1533 views
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Exposing Agile Software Development Myths
Agile development is a movement that started 11 years ago and now is a commonplace discussion for software development teams . . .
1442 views
1 replies
Nonviolent Communication (Stop It!)
Does Nonviolent Communication really work for you? Great! Then you're one of the few people in the world whose neocortex is able to bypass the limbic system. Consider yourself priviliged. ;-)
569 views
1 replies
The Robustness Index
Running into a common problem, again—deliver fast and maintain quality—a team of developers and I discussed how we might create visibility around this without having to get into long explanations about about technical debt with non-technically-minded people. We came up with the robustness index.
1136 views
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Build Less, Start Sooner
So these two strategies, Build Less Software and Start Sooner, sound simple on the surface, but in practice they can be very difficult to implement because of organizational inertia and politics. But they can be very effective and worth the effort to pursue.
3161 views
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The Big List of Agile Practices
This post is probably going to be hated and loved at the same time. Because, when people talk about agile practices, they can sometimes become very religious. Which means I may be putting my head in a noose with this one.
470 views
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Organizing an Agile Program: Part 2, Networks for Managing Agile Programs
What works for small programs is going to be different from what works for medium programs. It is going to be different from what works for large programs. Why? It’s the scaling problem and the communication path problem. Larger programs are not linear scales of smaller programs.
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So, Does Agile Really Kill Innovation?
In continuation of my earlier blog post on ‘Does Agile Kill Innovation?’, the question continues to be, does agile implicitly become the rate-limiting step for your innovation process?
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Mastery vs. GTD
One of my favorite books, called "Mastery", gently reminds us of the basics for any learning making readers aware that the mass culture quest for scoring, quick wins and quick fixes at any rate proves wrong in the long run and brings along the consequences more grave than one can imagine.
998 views
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The Inadequacy of Feedback
Or more accurately, the inadequacy of the after-course evaluation process to gather meaningful and actionable feedback.
727 views
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Agile Failure and Corporate Culture
I did a hand vote with a user group to see how much failure people had seen with Agile adoption they were involved in. The results were pretty much consistent with the other times I have run this: about 50% failure.
628 views
0 replies
Agile Scope Completion Techniques
One of the questions I've received in the past about agile techniques is how to ensure you've captured enough detail about your requirements in order to proceed without missing major scope elements.
494 views
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A Lead-By-Example Business Network
When you create a standard business, it is deceptively easy to create one legal entity with shareholders, appoint a top manager, form a management team, and a hire a truck load of employees to be bossed around and do all the work.
2741 views
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Ted Talk: Agile Programming -- for Your Family
I found a new Ted Talk on agile methodologies applied to family life. I've actually read about many families who do this and I've even met a developer who does this. He used Scrum in his own home. Now this little movement is getting attention in the form of a Ted Talk. Watch it here...
1628 views
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Penitence For The 7 Agile Sins
Half a year ago I wrote a blog post about 7 Agile Sins. As I’m sure that I’m not the only one who is guilty for one or more of these sins, I collected a list of possible ways to show penitence and to do it better next time :) So here is my list of the sins and their appropriate penitence.
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Making the Right Tradeoffs
Together the principles and practices we follow help us make the right tradeoffs so we can build the best system within the constraints we must work in.
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Agile Teams at Scale: Beyond Scrum of Scrums
Agile methods depend on effective cross-functional teams. We’ve heard many Agile success stories…at the team level. But what happens when a product can’t be delivered by one team? What do you do when the “team” that’s needed to work on a particular product is 20 people? Or 20 teams?
698 views
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Peer-to-Peer Feedback
One of the traps people fall into on teams is withholding information that’s critical for the team to function. Sometimes the information is about friction between team members. When team members don’t have a way to talk about small frictions, they turn in to big events, damage relationships and spill over onto the team.
1656 views
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Why an Agile Project Manager is Not a Scrum Master
A Scrum Master is not a project manager. A scrum master does not manage risk by him or herself. A project manager will take on the risk management responsibility without asking the team.
2183 views
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Chicken Thinking
"Put a good person in a bad system and the bad system wins, no contest.” It was amazing how quickly people, whose day job is to control actual important business numbers, lose focus of the same numbers (chicken-related, but important all the same) and their meaning.
1842 views
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Story Points Considered Harmful? 1 of 4 - Journey's Start
Now I’ll admit, when I first heard this argument I thought “Well I can guess where they are coming from” - I have sympathy with the argument, I’ve always considered story points as suspect myself. I also thought “But I don’t think they are right”.
1938 views
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A Flaccid Scrum is a Missed Opportunity
Martin Fowler wrote a prescient article about the rise of Flaccid Scrum. Having recently worked on an agile project that could act as Exhibit A for Flaccid Scrum, I have hardened my opinion on Scrum to the point where I believe that Scrum cannot succeed without XP-style technical practices.
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