I’m a huge fan of team-based collaboration to complete small stories through the architecture. (The image above shows three small stories implemented through the architecture.) More collaboration means lower WIP (Work in Progress). That lower WIP allows the team to increase their throughput (finished features) and lower cycle time (release something useful faster). (See how […]
Do you ever struggle with knowing if you should split stories? Or wondering if you have a valuable minimum? Jeffrey Frederick and Squirrel offered a signal for a too-small minimum in their podcast, MVP Cubed. That signal was when people became bored with the work. Let me add some additional tests: When the team can’t
At a recent talk about the Career Ladder posts, someone asked this question: Can managers pair effectively? That’s a great question. Some managers job-share. However, they don’t work simultaneously on the work. One person works for a couple of days. That person then hands off work to the other person. The handoff might work in
Early on in my agile practice, I believed in generalizing specialists. I even wrote Five Tips to Hiring a Generalizing Specialist. However, if a team becomes collaborative, I no longer think we need generalizing specialists. That’s because the team works and learns as a team. If a team is willing to collaborate as pairs, a
Many product owners and customers believe they know the problem they want to solve. That fake certainty causes them to define solutions, instead of solving the problem at hand. John Le Drew and I pair-wrote an article describing this problem and how to solve it. See Eliminate Fake Certainty and Solve the Real Problem. Yes, I’ve
I’ve been pair-writing a book with Mark Kilby, From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams: Collaborate to Deliver. We hit a big milestone today: We published the first complete draft today. We’ve been working on this book for a year. It’s much better because of our collaboration. We reflected a little on our success to
A colleague asked my opinion on the various teambuilding activities she was considering for a new-to-agile team, to help them get to know each other and work together. All the activities she considered were simulations of various kinds. I suggested she reconsider the simulations and focus on the work to help people learn to work
I’m writing a geographically distributed agile team book with Mark Kilby. We have a 30-minute timebox each morning to write. (We take time off for holidays, vacations, travel, etc.) Because we’re writing together, we first had to understand what we wanted to write in this book. We created a frame and a story map for
(I updated this post in May 2025 to more carefully describe what I mean by collaboration and how that differs from cooperation. I struck through collaboration when I meant cooperation.) A colleague asked mobbing last week on Twitter. Here’s the short answer, including pairing so you can see everything in one place: Swarming has a
I am shepherding an experience report for XP 2016. A shepherd is sort-of like a technical editor. I help the writer(s) tell their story in the best possible way. I enjoy it and I learn from working with the authors to tell their stories. The writers for this experience report want to pair-write. They have