Software Craftsmanship and Empowerment
Introduction
When was the last time you wrote a code that was not protected with unit test/refactoring? When was the last time you fixed a bug reported in a legacy code base that was full of bad code? When was the last time you saw a class with m...
The Case for Poker Cards in Sprint Planning
During sprint planning in Scrum, the team can use poker cards as a unit of measure for estimating the overall size of a user story, feature, or even associated piece of work.This tool helps the team assign points, in a relaxed manner, to stories o...
Bidding a Fixed-Price Project
This is the one question Agile teams are always asking each other, and I see many questions in blogs related to it as well. How do we bid on a fixed-price project? It's a question I asked myself for a long time. Finally I've found a solution &mdas...
Scrum: The Unity of Knowing and Doing
Human beings have two basic kinds of capabilities. One is knowing, including learning, making decisions, and planning. Making decisions and planning are based on using past experience to judge the future. The other capability is doing, including e...
The Case for a Technical ScrumMaster
When I first heard of the concept of Scrum nearly ten years ago, the role of the ScrumMaster seemed pretty easy to understand: a person who spent 50 percent of the time doing the same work as the team and 50 percent of the time enforcing the proce...
Everything I Needed to Know About Agile I Learned from Mountain Biking
I am blessed to live in Northern California, where our relentless commitment to preserving open space means that the San Francisco Bay Area boasts a wide variety of preserves with all levels of single track. Favorite trails reward mountain biker...
Developing Your Agile Coaching Skills
Coaching can be done by anyone on a team. Managers, ScrumMasters, product owners, anyone can help the team focus on removing impediments, working toward continuous improvement, and guiding the team toward higher performance. Having a coach dedicat...