Agile Thoughts

This entry is the third in a series of three, which describe the workshops I facilitated at Agile 2008.  The full description/original submission of this session can be seen on the Agile 2008 submissions board: Operating on the Creative Edge: Applying Improvisation Techniques in Agile. 
This was the second year at Agile that Jim York […]

Scrum is not some newfangled, flash-in-the pan methodology for software development (it isn’t a methodology at all, but that is off-topic for this blog).  Scrum is a very small part of a greater movement in the business world, and perhaps the world of organizations in general.  We are at the beginning of a true Kuhnian […]

Guided by a discussion on the Scrum Trainers list I just read Jeff Sutherland’s latest blog, Shock Therapy: Bootstrapping Hyperproductive Scrum, where he quotes the words of Scott Downey, the MySpace Scrum coach, describing his Scrum bootstrapping techniques.
There is something about the approach that disturbs me.  Jeff uses terms like “forceful and mandatory” to describe […]

This entry is the second in a series of three, which describe the workshops I facilitated at Agile 2008.  The full description/original submission of this session can be seen on the Agile 2008 submissions board: Fashion Cycle. 
This session, a mashup of Scrum, Artful Making and Project Runway was an attempt to see how people […]

In early August I was at the Agile2008 conference in Toronto, Canada.  I was privileged to run three workshops there, and in the process of writing up the sessions for the Agile2008 wiki, I decided to feed them into my blog.  My blog needs feeding.  This entry is the first of three.
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Scale Back: Small is […]

Many Scrum practitioners these days are working hard to come up with the best way to make Scrum work in distributed (usually off-shore) environments. There are many articles being written on this topic, and many submissions to the major Scrum and Agile conferences. They all say something similar, we know that co-location is ideal, […]

“Scaling agile is the last thing you want to do” — Martin Fowler [ref]
Everybody wants to scale Scrum. It seems like one of the first questions asked on many CSM courses. Day one, 11am: Yes, but how can I make this work with 5,000 people across 27 world-wide locations? Well, perhaps […]

On a recent scrumdevelopment thread about changing Scrum (here) Dave Barrett wrote:
I think that [Agile Software Development with Scrum] is just as relevant today as it was when Ken wrote it. We still use 30 day Sprints, an Excel spreadsheet for burndown charts, track in hours and estimate in Ideal Developer days. And it works […]

An open letter to Jim Highsmith
Dear Jim,
No More Self-Organizing Teams by Jim Highsmith
Cutter Consortium article, 9/13/2007
I read this article with interest. I am an anarchist at heart, and yes, I believe in grass-roots revolution as a way to fundamentally change the way we think about building software. I use my anarchistic tendencies to […]

It surprises me, but I have recently come across a few people in the Agile field who prefer estimating in “real time” over estimating in size (e.g. story points); I have even heard statements such as: the most advanced implementations of Agile use real time estimates, because it offers the most powerful benefits. My […]