All About Agile | Agile Development Made Easy!

What Is Agile?

Kelly Waters — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 22:44:01 PST

If anyone was thinking agile is old news, think again. As part of this blog, I monitor Google search volumes pretty closely, which gives a good indication of demand. And you know what? “What is agile” is still one of the biggest search terms around, and it’s still growing! In my...

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State of Agile survey for 2011 tells a familiar story

Simon Baker — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:00:00 PST

One particular chart in the State of Agile survey for 2011 tells a familiar story. Have a look.

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ThoughtWorks Live

Kelly Waters — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:43:48 PST

Today I’m at ThoughtWorks Live in Sydney, a one day invite-only event aimed at executives. The theme is Continuous Delivery, and how organisations need to constantly adapt in order to innovate and ultimately survive. It’s a really exciting agenda, but there are three bits I am...

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Specializing Generalist

Scott Sehlhorst — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 07:07:14 PST

The ideal agile team is made up of specializing generalists – but what does that really mean? The goal isn’t to prevent functional silos of expertise, it is to allow people to cover for each other. Great Conversation Elena Yatzeck (@eyatzeck) posted a comment on an earlier article...

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Looking For A New Sponsor

Kelly Waters — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 02:11:06 PST

Hi all. Apologies for this brief commercial interlude. I am looking for a new sponsor for this site. The sponsor ad position appears right at the top of every page, alongside my logo. Currently I’m getting about 50,000 views per month, of course all focused on the subject of agile. If...

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Separate Retrospectives

George Dinwiddie — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 03:18:59 PST

I was talking recently with a friend about separate retrospectives for sub-groups. They were worried about thing devolving into separate silos, with a retrospective for programmers, a retrospective for testers, a retrospective for analysts, …. I would be worried if that happened, too, but I can see...

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Rotating the ScrumMaster Role

Mike Cohn — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:18:18 PST

Some teams that struggle with choosing the best ScrumMaster decide that an appropriate strategy is to rotate the role among all team members. I don’t advocate this, as I don’t think it demonstrates an appropriate respect for the challenges and significance of the role. In my family, we rotate who...

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Three Keys to Successful Product Ownership

Arlen Bankston — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 12:50:00 PST

The Product Owner is both one of the most important roles in Scrum and often the most difficult to fill. In this post, I will explore a few aspects of successful product ownership that are often done poorly or not at all. Manage Both the Big Vision and...

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Committing for the Sprint

Joe Little — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:02:00 PST

This is, to me, still a New Year. And a friend suggested I talk about New Years' resolutions. Or something like them, Sprint commitments. Henry Ford said: Whether you think you can or you can't, you are usually right. So, let us work bac...

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Are managers evil?

Joe Little — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 17:56:00 PST

First, many have said that there are a lot of bad managers in the US, and in the world. Peter Drucker worked on this. W. Edwards Deming had his ideas, and worked on this. And many many business gurus have had their say, trying to improve the manager...

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Modifying Scrum – You THINK you know better…

Mike Vizdos — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:38:40 PST

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Important Words about Scrum and Tools

Mishkin Berteig — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 07:00:07 PST

Ken Schwaber, the founder of Scrum, has a blog. In it, someone mentioned that Scrum is changing. Ken responded: If you change the Scrum framework you just simply aren’t using Scrum and are probably canceling some of its most important benefits. Thank you Ken! I wholeheartedly agree. Every CSM...

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All About Agile: The Book (Publisher Wanted)

Kelly Waters — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 04:05:45 PST

Hi all. After nearly 5 years of blogging about agile, I have just finished converting my blog posts into a 430-page A5 book. It’s basically a compilation of everything I’ve written – at least anything of an educational and evergreen nature; edited, sequenced, and in one portable...

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Agile Planning Tools

George Dinwiddie — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 00:09:37 PST

One of the most exhilarating moments in my coaching career was when I entered the client team room one Monday morning to find they were pulling the cards and tape off of their backlog corkboard, and arranging it in a different fashion. I knew then that they had taken charge of their own process....

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Product Owner & the Team

Joe Little — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 16:53:00 PST

Is the product owner a member of the team? Yes. Fully and completely. What is the biggest problem that most teams face? That, at the high level (value) or the low level (details), they don't understand what the customer wants well enough. ...

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Road Rage: You and Your New Agile Teammates

Elena M Yatzeck — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 12:20:00 PST

As you join your teammates in your sparkling new agile team room, and you all do your best to quickly "become agile," I guarantee that despite being surrounded by brightly colored index cards and sticky notes, you may sometimes feel...angry. Here...

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Special New Year Offer – Get My eBook For Just $25

Kelly Waters — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 19:00:00 PST

Happy new year to you! I’ve been selling my ebook ‘Agile Made Easy!’ for some time now, so I’ve decided to make it available as a new year special offer for just $25, instead of the usual $50 I was selling it for before. For more information, click on this link: eBook...

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Can-do Thinking Makes Risk Management Impossible

Jim Highsmith — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 07:34:41 PST

“Can-do thinking makes risk management impossible. Since acknowledging real risk is defeatism, the risk management function in a can-do organization is restricted to dealing with those smallish risks that can be mitigated by quick action. That means you confront all the risks except the ones that...

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Seven Options for Handling Interruptions in Scrum and Other Agile Methods

Mishkin Berteig — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 07:15:46 PST

Almost three years ago we wrote a brief article about interruptions. In that article, we described four methods of dealing with interruptions. I would like to expand on those four methods and add three more to present a comprehensive set of options for organizations struggling with this. Option...

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Positive emotions and purpose

Simon Baker — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 14:14:31 PST

This post is really a sidebar to my musings about purpose and vision. It’s reference information rather than any real thoughts of my own, which I’ve pulled together because I wanted to touch on the theories behind the positive feelings we e...

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Faster. Faster. Faster.

Michael Dubakov — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 04:50:22 PST

Recently I’ve tried to analyze what affects development velocity. Every single product owner wants to have features delivered as soon as possible. It may sound that race for better velocity is a wrong goal and can lead to ugly “Work faster, basterds!” solution. But in a good and...

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Presentation: Smart Agile Metrics

Mike Griffiths — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 16:46:58 PST

I will be presenting on “Smart Agile Metrics” at the upcoming Calgary Agile Methods User Group (CAMUG) meeting Tuesday January 10th. Here is the outline: “Collecting and reporting effective metrics can be a tricky business. Einstein captured it well when...

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ScrumMasters – Feel Like Giving Up Sometimes?

Mike Vizdos — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 06:55:18 PST

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Please Help Me List the Problems with Using Agile or Scrum

Mike Cohn — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 14:03:25 PST

I’m trying to create a list of the biggest, most common, or hardest to overcome problems that a team might face when adopting Scrum or agile. I could really use your help by contributing to the list by adding a comment to this post. I’m thinking of things like: We have five product...

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Recommendations Not Rules

Mike Cohn — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 09:24:05 PST

I seem to be encountering more and more people who want to codify agile into a set of rules. I’ve seen this lately in authors of books, blogs or PDFs about agile or Scrum that say “You must do this” or “If you don’t do this or all of that then you’re not doing it...

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