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 […]
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
There was a question on a LinkedIn group earlier this week about a program with teams with interconnected features and how did you know when a feature was done. After all, a feature wasn’t done until all the teams were done with it. After a few more questions, I realized the teams were architectural teams,
I had a blast talking with Raechel and Ty on the Talking Work podcast. I totally blew the trivia question. Oh well. I still had a blast! Thanks Raechel and Ty.
When I lead public workshops, I ask people what their experience with with agile is. In the past, if I asked people if they were experienced with agile, their answers were reliable. Now, not so much. People think if they can spell agile, they are agile. If they sometimes use timeboxes, they are agile. If
I’ve been writing through my travels. Today, Stickyminds published Not Ready for Agile? Start Your Journey with Release Trains. In February, Gantthead.com published Timebox or Kanban: A False Dichotomy. I would have let you know, but I was traveling and was unaware they published it! I write the columns ahead of time and don’t know
In But I Need to Know When the Project Will Be Done, I talked about what you can do for estimating an agile project (do a gross estimate of the backlog, estimate your velocity, better your estimate every iteration and keep talking to your management). What if you have a contract? What if your managers
I was talking with a new-to-agile project manager, who said he needed take the first iteration to do design and estimation. I asked why. “Because our management needs to know exactly when the project will be done.” “Do you think your iteration of design and estimation will provide you a perfect estimate?” “Uh.” He paused.
I was talking with a project manager the other day. He said, “I don’t have enough developers, testers, or UI people. What am I going to do?” I said, “Well, you have enough people if you have more time. Do you have more time?” He rolled his eyes, and said, “What do you think?” “Then,
“I want to move to agile. Or lean. I don’t know which. I just know I have to show progress more often. I want to be able to adapt to changing conditions. That means I have to choose between timeboxes or Kanban, right?”– a confused project manager, on the verge of adopting a more agile