Agile Blog

The other day a manager called me and asked if I would recommend sending one of his people to one of my Professional Scrum Master classes. I told him no. Read more »

In the early 1950′s, cake mix was introduced in the U.S. Take some mix, add water, and put it in the oven. In ten minutes you had a homemade cake. Great idea, right?

It wasn’t. Really bad idea actually. Huge failure!

Until one of the vendors figured out what the problem was, took action accordingly and left their competition behind in the dust, wondering what happened.

So what happened, and why should you as a software development professional care about that?

What they figured out was that Read more »

On my way to work today I heard that the Swedish government demands that meteorologists increase the precision of their weather forecasts to 85%. Have they heard about the butterfly effect? Are knowledge about complexity theory and chaotic systems optional for running a country? One would hope not! How about for running a business? A department? A team? Managing a product line? A development project? Read more »

For a while, I have been thinking about writing a series of papers with hands-on advice on how to use Scrum. Note that I don’t claim to know exactly what your environment looks like and how you should best make use of Scrum, only you can figure that out.

No, the idea with the paper’s is Read more »

Once I got lost driving to the airport and kept driving for so long before asking for directions so that I missed my flight home…

With people in nothern Europe returning from their vacations I have two questions for all of you that are using daily standup meetings in your teams:

1. How long were you driving this vacation before admitting being lost and Read more »

Got the news today that Ken Schwaber had graded my responses to the essay style questions and that I passed the Professional Scrum Master II exam! So far only about a dozen people in the world have Read more »

Who has got the most power over your team? Is it your manager, or perhaps your local tech guru?

Well…probably not! Not if you picked a reasonably motivated individual anyway…

According to team building expert Christopher Avery, the most powerful member of a team is Read more »

Traditionally developed software does not age gracefully. In fact, on average, it only takes about five years for newly developed software to deteriorate to a state where it is no longer economically feasible to maintain it. I.e. the cost of adding new features is larger than the income that the new features would generate.

Why does this keep happening? The answer is Read more »

One of the best ways to get started with an effort to get more agile is to co-locate teams, creating “war-rooms” for them to work in. Studies like this show that co-locating teams at least doubles productivity. In the study above, the teams that used the new facilities after the study was finished actually did even better, Read more »

The last part in our three part series about agile development and contracts will provide a glimpse into the future by looking at how thought leaders have managed contracts to foster cooperation between companies and to create superior performance in complex environments:

Are rigid contracts needed for protection so that companies will not take advantage of each other? Actually there is another way Read more »