Community Blog

Recently I worked with a new customer in Denver to help them move towards a greater degree of Scrum in their software development. The idea that Scrum is for everyone in your organisation is kind of new, but it reflects the modern understanding of the way people work, and the rejection of Taylorism and command and control.

There is nothing in the Scrum Guide that says that you can't have workflow across the Sprint boundary. I'm going to suggest that not only can you, but you should as long as you don't endanger the Sprint Goal.

Most Scrum Teams that I encounter don’t do refinement of their Product Backlog and try to work on things that they don’t understand correctly. However, if you get to the Sprint Planning Event and your backlog is not ready, then you are doing it wrong.

In my last post about Professional software teams creating working software David Corban made a good point. How do you determine what "Free from fault or defect" means?

Many organisations wrestle with the seeming incompatibility between agile and release management and they struggle with release planning and predictable delivery.

There is a frustrating misunderstanding of reality when one thinks that the Product Owner can reject a single story at the Sprint Review.

There is a better way than staggered iterations for delivery that will keep you on the path to agility. Staggered iterations lead to more technical debt and lower quality software.

Many teams are struggling with delivering modern software because they are not building with Test First Principals.

There are a number of things that you have to think about when selecting a modern source control system. Some of that is purely about code, but modern source control systems are about way more than code.

Last time I talked about the Ghana Police Service (GPS) I was talking about Professional Organisational Change and the approach the Inspector General of Polic

The Ghana Police Service is in trouble. Over the last few last few decades, each new Police organisation and government has tried in various ways to carry out some change but most changes have been ad-hoc, temporary, not robust enough or strategic. The old problems return to haunt new administrations and many police officers and the Public has lost hope.

You need quality enablement to achieve predictable delivery for your organisation which takes effort to achieve.

Many companies have started searching for self-organisation. That ideal or nirvana where teams can figure out how to work together effectively with limited or little direction to solve problems.  

Does your company culture resemble Survivor? Do you have a culture in your organisation where individuals that help others are considered slackers for not getting their own assignments complete?

Did you know that the DOD has made it illegal to do waterfall? For the first time in many years the Department of Defence (DOD) in the United States had made a major update to its procurement rules.

Gathering the metrics for Evidence-based Management in software organisations can be a strenuous task and I have a number of customers that are fretting on what to collect and from where.

A few weeks ago I headed out to the Scrum.org offices in Boston to participate in training to hone my skills as an Evidence-based Management Consultant.