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.

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 [...]

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

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Continuing our three part series about contracts and agile software development, here is part 2 about how to handle the fixed price environment that most of us work in today: If you are an agile development organization, but you do actually have to submit a bid for a fixed price, fixed scope contract anyway,

When presenting the agile approach to audiences new to the ideas, one comment is by far the most common. It is: “How can we do this, we have to work with fixed scope, fixed price contracts?” We will cover this question in a three part newsletter,

What do you think the one activity is that takes up the most of the time for software developers today? In a draft of a new book, Amr Elssamadisy presents this hypothetical experiment that allows us to figure this out:

A very powerful, but one of the most non-intuitive agile practices is pair programming. Before one has tried to get good at this, it seems unbelievable that it is actually is better and more efficient for two people to work side by side on the same problem than having two developers working individually. If you [...]