Disclaimer: opinions expressed in this post are not meant to offend anyone; they are highly subjective and based on my own experiences. Let’s start with a story from some years ago, when I was seeking a job as a junior developer, right out of studies. A male friend did the ...
What is the nature of Scrum? What are it's cultural characteristics? What are companies going to face if they introduce Scrum while trying to maintain their existing corporate cultures?
I am going to find out - with your help!
At http://scrumorakel.de/surveys/ you can find two surveys, each of whi...
Couple of weeks back, I noticed an incident that triggered this post. Senior Management in a company applauded people for showing individual heroics on the project. Some of them were: Staying late in office to address a client request? Responding to project emails at late night. Rewarding testers on...
The purpose of Scrum is to help people inspect & adapt, to provide transparency to the work being undertaken, to know reality to base decisions on, to adjust, to adapt, to change, to gain flexibility. The rules, principles and roles of the framework, as described in the Scrum Guid...
Estimation has been the bane of the developer’s life ever since we moved beyond the hacker era of software creation, and into “corporate software”. When people hacked, they just wrote code, completed stuff and released it. People took pride in their work, challenged one another, ma...
Many teams are struggling with delivering modern software because they are not building with Test First principals. Test First gives us the assurance that we have built the correct thing, that what we built is what the customer asked for and that when we change things we don’t break anything i...
You’ve seen the statistics - Jeff Sutherland’s group consistently achieving 500-750% increases in productivity, organisations tripling their productivity in a matter of months etc. You’ve implemented Scrum so how come you aren’t reaping these sorts of benefits?
[Read more...]...
Software development is often fundamentally different than the analogies used to describe it. Accordingly, estimating what software will be done and by when can be an exercise in frustration. Yet, some teams seem to just "get it", making accurate predictions of cost or effort. Other teams struggle w...
Charles Darwin published "On the Origin of Species" in 1859. It is somewhat remarkable that some of the theories enunciated in this work can be verified over 150 years later, in human knowledge fields such different from biology as software development.
LinkedIn is a Wall Street darling, its stock up more than threefold in two years on soaring revenue, spiking profits, and seven straight quarters beating bankers’ estimates. But LinkedIn’s success isn’t just about numbers: an impressive acceleration of LinkedIn’s product cycl...
Imagine my surprise when Agile 2.0 was “announced” at the recent EclipseCon 2013 in Boston. Here I am thinking the simple tenets so clearly outlined in the The Agile Manifesto of 2001 have yet to be fulfilled by most software organizations more than a decade later. Sure, some organizatio...
Frederick Winslow Taylor wrote his Book "Scientific Management" back in 1911. His book is available for free online - consider reading it. Taylor wanted to end the "waste of manpower" and stated that "In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first." (p. 7) Taylor quickly ...
The only principles that make a difference are the ones you know by heart, swear by, and live by. Everything else is just blather.
For a long time, I've been fascinated from afar by Agile programming practices, which have proven themselves on all these levels. I've wondered why they haven't been ...
It is often said that the Product Backlog must capture all requirements. However, the Product Backlog is not a replacement for the old requirements list. This would limit it to a new name for an old habit. The value of the Product Backlog lies not in precision, in detail or in perfection, like the r...
I was hired to help out in adopting Agile management. Before I started I had an interview and talked to a top level manager on Lean and how I could help the organization in their journey. In my naivety I actually assumed that we had a similar understanding about what Agile management is. Unfortunate...