Difference between Agile and Lean
What is the difference between Agile and Lean? A lot of people are asking about the difference between Agile and Lean. Are they the same? Which came first? Which is better? Better for what? This article attempts to answer all of these questions. Lean came first. It is Japanese and old Lean is old. Very old. […]
Continue readingWhy Continuous Delivery is so important
Scrum is a (pretty) good framework for managing requirements, how they move into and out of backlogs, and how we inspect and adapt the outcome of those requirements. But one of its weaknesses is it has very little to say about engineering practices. One of those engineering practices is Continuous Delivery, or CD. This discipline […]
Continue readingServant Leadership and management by measurement
I was reading a bizarre post on Linkedin Pulse about some wacky new system for story point estimation. The details of it aren’t interesting or important. What is interesting is the motivation behind it. The imaginary problem that many people think needs to be solved is that traditional managers, when moved (kicking and screaming) to an […]
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, […]
Continue readingMisconceptions around Minimum Viable Product
One of the most controversial topics in Agile / Lean thinking at the moment is the Minimum Viable Product, or MVP. This article will try and clear up the misconceptions around Minimum Viable Product. What is a Minimum Viable Product? This concept came from Eric Ries’ influential book, The Lean Startup (which you should definitely read if […]
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