I once worked for a company that prided itself of doing distributed agile. The vision was to have one team split across two different country so that work could continue around the clock. They had the development team in Chicago and a testing team in India. Work completed in Chicago at the end of the day, was tested in India overnight … or at least that was the sales pitch.
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: Planning, Project Management, Scrum , distributed, distributed agile, distributed scrum, distributed software development, Planning, Project Management, Scrum
After a few months off from client related work, I’m ready to get back into the swing of things. A few years ago, I did a tour of Europe which was a fantastic experience. This year I’ll be doing a tour of Australia, and quite possibly New Zealand later in the year.
This is exciting because I haven’t been in this part of the world for nearly 5 years. I’ll be interested to see the difference in work habits and behaviours with the US … and it’ll give me an opportunity to reflect upon how I’ve personally changed.
Here are the dates of my training courses for the first half of the year:
- Brisbane February 25th & 26th. Register here.
- Sydney: March 25th & 26th. Register here.
- Melbourne: April 22nd & 23rd. Register here.
- Canberra May 27th & 28th. Register here.
- Melbourne June 24th & 25th. Register here.
Filed under: Agile Software Development, Project Management, Training , Certified Scrum, CSM, Scrum, Training
Image by PSD: http://www.flickr.com/photos/psd/
Someone asked me recently what where the five top reasons why companies adopt Scrum. I had difficulty answering this question, because, without doing a reasonably rigorous survey it’s difficult to provide a comprehensive answer. I do however, have some experience with companies adopting Scrum and I could provide the top five reasons that I’ve personally witnessed.
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: Agile Software Development, Organisation Change, Planning, Project Management, Scrum , Agile Software Development, Organisation Change, Planning, Project Management, Scrum
Image by Zevotron: http://www.flickr.com/photos/randomurl/
Over the last few years we’ve seen the introduction of Agile software development into the mainstream. In 2006 the Agile Alliance are
claimed that Agile frameworks had
crossed the chasm. Frameworks such as Scrum have been seized upon by management and they are the ones who are now controlling the introduction of Agility.
The reasons for this are quite understandable. Management are simply looking for ways to improve how technology (and especially software) is created. And why shouldn’t they? As a profession we have been spectacular in our failures. We have deliver low quality code, at a cost that’s greater than what was promised, and we’ve delivered it late. We should expect there to be changes to this state of affairs.
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: Agile Software Development, Cultural Change, Organisation Change, Project Management, Scrum, Technology , Agile Software Development, Cultural Change, Organisation Change, Project Management, Scrum, Technology
The Kobayashi Maru is the name of a starship in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and also the name of a simulation of a no-win scenario. Wikipedia has a good outline of the scenario and the dilemma:
… the cadet receives a distress signal, stating that the Kobayashi has struck a “gravitic mine” in the Klingon Neutral Zone and is rapidly losing power, hull integrity and life support. There are no other vessels nearby. The cadet is faced with a decision:
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: Product Ownership, Project Management, Scrum , Decision Making, Kobayashi Maru, Product Owner, Scrum
Planning Poker cards make great promotional items. They are both fun and useful, and many companies freely distribute Planning Poker decks as part of their marketing efforts. But you don’t need some brand name deck to make Planning Poker fun and interesting. A creative idea, a printer and some stiff paper is all you need to make your own deck.
Custom Planning Poker Cards
Here’s a deck from a company that I was at a few weeks ago. The team is coached by
Angela Druckman, and had a common interest in wine tasting. As you can see the results are fantastic! I absolutely love these cards.
Filed under: Agile Software Development, Planning, Project Management , Agile Software Development, Estimating, Planning, Planning Poker
Team self-organization is one of the key principles [1] of Scrum and its introduction to an organization raises a number of interesting questions around decisions and decision making. Specifically, the introduction of Scrum leads to consensus-based decisions by the team. I believe that the consensus model of decision is superior the an authoritarian model and results in superior decisions and better information.
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: Cultural Change, Organisation Change, Project Management
Is your team having difficulty forecasting when a project will be completed? Do you have a large number of un-estimated Stories in your product backlog? Are your planning meetings several days long and full of confrontation? If so, it could be that you’re forgetting to “groom” your product backlog.
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: Agile Software Development, Planning, Project Management
It’s been a busy few months with clients, training and the occasional blog posting. To add to all this activity, I’ve agree to do a Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) training tour of Europe. This is going to be exciting because I haven’t been to Europe for over 10 years. It’ll be an interesting contrast after having spent the last 7 years in the US.
I hope to have an opportunity to blog-on-the-road, and will (hopefully) include photos of some of the training courses. Here’s my training schedule:
New York – 7th & 8th March, 2007
Helsinki – 14th & 15th March, 2007
Stockholm – 21st & 22nd March, 2007
Oslo – 28th & 29th March, 2007
Copenhagen – 4th & 5th April, 2007
Vienna – 11th & 12th April, 2007
Munich – 18th & 19th April, 2007
Paris – 2nd & 3rd May, 2007
London – 9th & 10th May, 2007
Edinburgh – 17th & 18th May, 2007
Details on these courses can be found here. Alternatively, if you’re reading this and would like to meet up at any of these locations, I’d love to hear from you. If you leave a comment [to this post], I’ll reply as soon as I can.
Wishing you a Happy New Year!
Kane.
Filed under: About Me, Agile Software Development, Project Management, Scrum, Training
Here’s another excellent Google TechTalk. This one is given by Mary Poppendieck, author of “Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit for Software Development Managers” and “Implementing Lean Software Development“.
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: Agile Software Development, Project Management, Scrum, Technology
The Enhanced (or Alternative) Release Burndown graph [1],[2] is a great tool and one of my personal favourites. It demonstrates several things very clearly. It demonstrates:
- The rate at which work is being completed by the team
- The rate at which new work is being added to the product backlog
- And, it can be used to determine a date range for completion.
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: Agile Software Development, Patterns, Planning, Project Management, Scrum
This first appeared on the ScrumAlliance.org website on October 30th. It is presented here in its original unedited form.
Burndown graphs are commonly used in Scrum projects to give the team an understanding of the amount of work remaining for the Sprint (or iteration). In Ken’s own words:
“As a team works together, it develop its own style of creating and maintaining the Sprint Backlog. It also demonstrates unique work patterns, some working consistently, some in bursts, some at the end of a Sprint. Some seek pressure, while others seek regularity. Across time, the backlog charts of each team develop predictable patterns. They stabilize as the team learns the technology, the business or product domain, and each other. These chart patterns are called Sprint signatures.” – ControlChaos.com [1]
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: Agile Software Development, Patterns, Planning, Project Management, Scrum
Update: Ed Gibbs writes (here) about some of the challenges that he’s facing within his organization. Interesting stuff.
I like two week iterations. The short timeframe ensures quick feedback, and makes the team more responsive to the Product Owners needs. But two week iterations can be very uncomfortable for teams that are familiar with delivery cycles that span months. One of the very first issues that is raised is that the team does not have sufficient time to be “done”.
Typically what this means is that the software will be code complete at the end of an iteration, but will not have been fully tested. It usually gets delivered late and hence there is insufficient time for full and rigorous testing. After the third of forth sprint it’s common for a team to ask me if we can change to three (or four) week iterations to “allow more time for testing.“
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: Agile Software Development, Project Management, Scrum, Uncategorized
Ken Schwaber[1] recently did a talk at Google and they recorded the session. He provides an overview of Scrum and covers many of the basics. It’s an excellent video and you can find it here.
References
[1] Ken’s Home page
[2] ScrumAlliance
Filed under: Agile Software Development, Project Management, Scrum
This last week I was at the ScrumExchange conference down in Palo Alto. It was an great conference and I especially enjoyed the sessions led by Matt Smith [2]. They were thought provoking and very entertaining … an great foil for some of the other heavy material.
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: Agile Software Development, Planning, Project Management, Scrum
This is the second article that I wrote for the Scrum Alliance [3]. It was orginally published on July 24 and can be found here. The article presented below is the original unedited version with all my grammar and spelling mistakes!
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: Agile Software Development, Patterns, Planning, Project Management, Scrum
InfoQ readers: There is an incorrect link on InfoQ. If you’re looking for the Rothman article on addressing technical debt, you can find it here. But since you’re here already, why not stay a while and enjoy the view?
This article was written for the ScrumAlliance [3] and featured on the site on 17th July, 2006. There was some significant editing before it was featured [on the ScrummAlliance.org website] so there are differences with the article presented here. The message however remains the same. You can find the original article here.
This article is the orginal unedited version, complete with bad grammar and spelling mistakes!
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: Agile Software Development, Estimating, Planning, Project Management, Scrum
A question that often comes up on Agile projects is; how do I determine when I can release software? For most project teams that are accustom to a defined process (Waterfall, RUP etc) it’s not immediately obvious how transition an Agile project from “Development” to “Production”.
I have put quotes around “Development” and “Production” because, within the Agile world, there is no concept of a “Development” phase nor a “Production” phase.
But regardless of Agile niceties, how do Agile projects go live?
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: Agile Software Development, Estimating, Planning, Project Management, Scrum
Over the last six months, I have been working with a client that is moving from “RUP” to Scrum. It’s unfair to describe their projects as using RUP because in truth they’re more waterfall than RUP. The project teams used RUP nomenclature and artifacts, but still worked within the waterfall lifecycle.
One particular project that I help convert had an interesting set of circumstances that put the Product Owner/Customer in a very difficult situation.
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: Agile Software Development, Cultural Change, Estimating, Organisation Change, Project Management, Scrum
I’ve recently been coaching a team that has taken particularly well to Scrum. After a few iterations the project team quickly settled down into a regular rhythm of producing software. The ScrumMaster (Ken) dutifully recorded the teams Velocity [the number of Story Points completed per iteration], in addition to some financial metrics. This included the cost of each iteration (also known as the burn rate).
At some point the Ken decided to calculate the cost of each story point. This is a brief description of what he did and the results.
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: Agile Software Development, Estimating, Planning, Project Management, Scrum
Recent Comments