Recently I observed financial irrationality. A new project was projected to make a significant impact on financial performance for the organization. The IT group has a standard schedule and SLA for projects that it didn’t want to change, so IT wanted to delay implementation by a month.
The project had a projected impact of $50 million [...]

In a recent Certified Scrum Product Owner course, we presented the following slide that contrasted Acceptance Criteria to a team’s Definition of Done:

I saw one of our students light up.  I knew that her “light bulb” had gone off.   As many others who have seen this slide in the past, I would have expected that she [...]

We’re seeing an increasing number of clients with distributed Agile development teams. Although this runs somewhat counter to simplistic views of Agile development practices, which focus on co-located teams, it is a much more realistic reflection of actual global development practices. Global, agile teams are here to stay. As a result, we need to extend and adapt existing agile principles and practices, and, at times, create some new ones.

Recently, a discussion emerged from the Beyond Agile community asking where business analysis and allied concerns such as user experience fit in an Agile development project. Should business analysts be sprinkled in the development team? Should a business analyst team be working a sprint or two ahead to feed the development team?

As Scrum is introduced into an organization with many teams, there are usually questions about particular roles and how they will work with teams.

You’re about to add a feature, but it looks difficult to do. You need to fix a bug, but you don’t understand the code. You’re doing a code review and you have a suggestion. What do you do? Refactor!

For test-driven development, integrated development environments like Eclipse provide shortcuts for use of tools like JUnit.

A colleague recently pointed me at a post authored a couple years ago by Gerald Weinberg entitled Test Trimming: A Fable about Testing, which includes a fable Mr. Weinberg wrote for his granddaughter entitled “Rhubarb Cakes for the Queen of the Forest”.

I had been at a client engagement where there are several teams that have introduced Scrum and making great progress over the last several Sprints. I had not visited the client for about a week, and needed a way to get up to date quickly on what is happening on each of teams.

What’s “The Agile Coach”? It’s a new podcast from SolutionsIQ that explores the challenges and joys of coaching Agile teams.