Conducting a retrospective at the end of a sprint is a core Agile practice. It constitutes one of the key ‘meetings’ for Scrum (along with sprint planning, sprint review, and the daily scrum meeting itself) and when done well it provides a valuable lever for the continuous improvement of the development team. The main scrum… Continue reading Looking back on retrospectives
I’ve written before about the importance of good testing in Agile development but a few things happened during our current sprint that raised this valuable issue for me again. Here are a few brief thoughts about this key topic. To set the context for these thoughts let me tell you a little about our development… Continue reading I love when our tests fail
Early on in this set of blog posts about Agile planning I talked about the common image of the planning onion, in which there are different layers of planning that start with the widest strategic view and progress all the way to daily planning. So far I have written about strategy and portfolio planning in… Continue reading The goal of sprint planning
In my previous (long) post I talked about navigating potential conflicts that can emerge in Agile planning when a company has an inter-related set of products. I suggested that product owners have a valuable role to play in navigating these collisions by facilitating communication, articulating trade-offs, recognizing leverage opportunities, and offering a wider perspective. I… Continue reading So who decides when someone has to?
Groucho Marx once famously observed that outside of a dog a book is a man’s best friend while inside of a dog it’s too dark to read. We could use a similar analogy to talk about Agile planning and say that good planning does not happen in a vacuum because either it’s too dark, cramped,… Continue reading When worlds collide
It has been a little while since I’ve been in a good rhythm with my blogging but I am trying to get to one now. I want to work through the remaining posts in the current arc about Agile planning. Believe it or not I work hard to keep my blog posts concise. I think… Continue reading Summary on my next two posts
As I refocus on trying to blog more regularly about life as a Product Owner in an Agile software development organization, I want to start out with a set of posts on the topic I planned to write about in the fall as I wound down my series on velocity. I planned to start my… Continue reading An Agile plan to write about planning in Agile
I wrote recently about sustainable development and wanted to follow this up with a piece focused around something we’ve been talking about a lot on the project teams I serve as a product owner: how can we understand and increase our velocity? Velocity is about the productivity of the development team and this can be… Continue reading Understanding velocity in product development
Over the past few months as I have been writing broadly about ‘Agility’ I have been interweaving my reflections on the Agile Principles with my thoughts about some of the specific development issues we face as a firm. As I wrap up this loose series and prepare for the next arc of blog entries about… Continue reading Sustainable development pace
I mentioned in my last post that I wanted at some point to share more of my thoughts about using prototypes when developing highly complex software solutions. While the ideas are fresh in my mind I wanted to write some about this now. When I talk about prototypes I do not mean the first ‘beta’… Continue reading Prototypes for complex software
InTruthItsNotThatSimple 