In my post, When You Have No Product Owner at All, I said That’s because agile needs a responsible person who is not part of the cross-functional technical team to rank the backlog so the team knows the order of the work. Without that person, the team does not know what to do. I’ve had […]
What happens when you have no product owner at all? How does a team know what features to develop in what order? Several teams I know encountered this. They all had product managers. Most of them had Business Analysts. All of them had a technical manager who was willing to be their product owner, but
I prepare for my speaking and workshop engagements. This year, I’ve been all over the world. I’ve had a great time, and my clients and audiences have had a great time, too. Well, except for this past week at my session, “The Budgeting Black Hole: Predicting the Unpredictable” at Agile 2011. There, I bombed. I
I recently spoke with a colleague who’s a little confused. John was just promoted to being the development manager in a small organization. He’s used to doing lots of work—whatever needs to be done, he does. Now, he’s managing 6 developers in an organization that’s trying to move to agile. No, they haven’t had any
Every so often, my blog gets plagiarized. I do a whois, find the offending party, have a short email conversation, and get that person to remove my content, and forget the whole thing ever happened. Not now. Right now, I’m having a very dissatisfying email conversation with domainsbyproxy.com, DBP. They are protecting creativedevelopment.biz, CD. You
For those of you who follow All Things Agile, SQE has acquired Agile Journal. And, with that acquisition, comes a few changes. Russell Pannone, our agile buddy, has stepped away as editor-in-chief. Russell is irreplaceable. I’m not replacing him as editor-in-chief, but I am acting as technical editor for the site and I am looking
Because I’m a consultant, I receive emails with a question, “Do you consult in <fill in this blank>?” Many times I do. But the real question is. “What is your objective?” or “Why do you want to do <this thing>?” There are many good reasons to do so. Release some product—any product, for example! Go
Lisa, Vin, and Derek in their comments on Agile, Architects, and Programs were concerned about how an architect might lead the test architecture work. They have good reason to be concerned. I hadn’t expressed how I see architecture working in an agile program, and they haven’t been to my talks, where I have discussed it.
When I was on vacation, I realized that lots of people already know that we need development architects on complex programs. And, lots of people forget that we also need test architects on complex programs. The more complex the product, the more you need integrated testing, so the more agile makes sense for your product.
Feature-itis. It’s an agile Product Owner game. It’s when the Product Owner says, in his or her best George Carlin voice, “Gimme Features. I don’t care about no stinkin’ framework. I don’t care about no technical debt. I don’t care that it’s going to make your work harder later. I only care about now. I’m