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This is why your agile retrospectives don’t work
Every team doing scrum will (should really) be doing a retrospective each sprint. This means that the team gets together and discusses what went well, what went not so well, and what could be improved. The idea is that these regular retrospectives become an engine of “Kaizen” or Continuous Improvement for the team. How do […]
Continue readingTop 5 things NOT to do in your agile daily standup
How (not) to run an Agile standup I know how to run an agile daily standup, right? Most people probably think standups are straightforward, and that any idiot can run them. This is not at all the case. A lot of people are doing it wrong – don’t be one of them! This article will […]
Continue readingWhat is story point estimation anyway?
If you’ve read the last post I wrote and are scratching your head as to what all this ‘points’ and ‘velocity’ stuff is, this article is a quick primer on what is story point estimation. I’ll explain what it is, how it is usually done, and why we are supposed to do it. I’ll also […]
Continue readingAgile metrics – the good, the bad and the ugly
Agile teams often look at and discuss metrics. Some of these metrics are interesting and important, some of them are of questionable value, and some should only be used with caution. This article will attempt to clear this up. The use and misuse of metrics Before going into the various metrics that agile teams use, […]
Continue readingAgile Release Planning as a range of probabilities
A lot of people find release planning difficult and confusing in Agile. How can we plan out our releases when we don’t have fixed scope? When will we know something is ready for release? How do we use velocity to help our planning? Are releases tied to iterations? I’m going to try and answer these […]
Continue readingAre story points really about value?
I used to think story points were about work When I started doing Agile, I was introduced to the idea of user stories and story points. They seemed pretty clear to me; user stories were defined pieces of work, and the story points was an estimation of how much work there was to do in […]
Continue readingDon’t split people across agile teams
Why do people get split across agile teams? People sometimes get split across teams when working agile (or Waterfall, for that matter). You might hear things like “this team has two front-end developers, two back-end developers, a UX designer, a tech BA, and 50% of an architect”. Why 50%? There are usually two reasons: The […]
Continue readingScrum-but and Agile anti-patterns
There are many stories about Scrum-but and agile anti-patterns. If you’re wondering about the term, it comes from the idea “we’re doing Scrum, but we” [do something that is completely the opposite of what it says to do in Scrum]. Often this is because a firm doesn’t want to make changes when adopting Scrum. Problem […]
Continue readingProduct versus Sprint backlog
I was reading a long and strange rant against Agile recently. It’s this one, if you’re curious and you have a lot of time to burn. It confirmed my belief that people often don’t understand the difference between the Product Backlog and the Sprint Backlog. This is a really important distinction. If people get it wrong, […]
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