Technical Spikes in Agile and Scrum
Technical spikes are a great way for teams to scope out some work that they don’t fully understand before they begin work on it. Spikes are used by teams to suss out or do [...]
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Category: Agile Practices
Why is “Trusting” So Hard?
I’ve been training and coaching agile teams for more than 15 years. While I’ve seen quite a lot of unique dysfunctions, one of the most prevalent is the overall lack of [...]
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Do We Need a Technical Scrum Master?
I’m coaching and mentoring a woman who is beginning her journey as a Scrum Master. She has a very non-technical background and at lunch yesterday asked me if I thought [...]
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Definition of Ready as an Anti-pattern
Mike Cohn in a recent newsletter entitled: The Dangers of Definition of Ready made some solid points that have had me “thinking” ever since I read it. You see, I’ve been a [...]
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An Alternative Way to Assign User Story Poi [...]
One of the hardest concepts for some teams to understand, especially when they first start using user stories, is that of story points. “What is a point?” they [...]
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What’s Safe in SAFe?
To be fair, I’ve been fairly critical of some aspects of the Scaled Agile Framework. And even though I’m a SPC, I still don’t blindly install SAFe in many of my [...]
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The 3 C's Refresher - Cards, Conversations, and [...]
When I train agile teams – especially Scrum teams – I always bring up my experience as a developer starting with eXtreme Programming (at least my company’s [...]
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Larger-scale Retrospectives
If you’ve followed me at all, you know that I worked at a company called iContact from 2009 – 2012. It was one of the best agile experiences of my life, both professi [...]
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Agile Task Estimation - Necessity or Was [...]
Agile task breakdown and estimating can be a difficult conversation to have with teams. I had a conversation with one of our teams several days ago and we were discussing decomp [...]
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ScrumMasters – Just Say No!
Tanner Wortham is a ScrumMaster and coach who I’ve quoted on this blog before. He recently wrote a blog post entitled: When Can a ScrumMaster Say No which I read with [...]
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