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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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

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 [...]