Agile Ceremonies
Agile Ceremonies Defined There are multiple agile ceremonies practiced in both Scrum and Kanban. These ceremonies define activities performed by agile teams to improve communication and delivery. Each ceremony serves…
Branch by Sprint
I ran into a new branching strategy, branch by sprint, this week. I will have to admit it was a new one to me. I've seen branching by environment (dev, test, staging, prod), branching by developer, and branching by feature/user story. I had not considered branching for a sprint. (more…)
Most sprint planning meetings are Crap! How do I make mine great? (Part One)
Our teams break down sprint planning into two main meetings: the "What" meeting and the "How" meeting. The "What" meeting involves the product owners and stakeholders. The "How" meeting is…
What is a Scrum Development Team?
Don't limit your thinking when it comes to defining "what" a Scrum development team is. It is not just those writing code. It's not just developers or programmers. The team…
Agile Lexicon Term: Sprint
Sprint - a short development circle time boxed to typically two week periods in which the development works to complete the user stories they committed to during Sprint Planning.
How to Groom User Stories
User stories start their lives as an unruly mess. They often have just the briefest of descriptions, no direction and no vision for what they will be when they mature…
The Terrible Cost of Multi-tasking
Very simply I want to illustrate the impact of multi-tasking. It has an impact on value delivered as well as satisfaction from stakeholders and customers. My very simple model consists…
Capturing a Backlog of User Stories
An effective Agile shop starts with a well groomed backlog of user stories. This means collecting all of the user stories the organization is asking for into the backlog. But…
What is a Scrum burn-down chart?
I was first introduced to burn-down charts without knowing that’s what I was seeing. I was attending a monthly chapter meeting of the Project Management Institute (PMI) and the guest…
Article Recommendation: What are Story Points? By Mike Cohn
Mike Cohn has a great introduction to the concept of story points and how to think about them on his blog at MountainGoatSoftware.com. It is a brief introduction that gives a…
