Agile Should the customer talk with the Scrum developers? A Scrum product owner (PO) is on leave, and the customer has a pressing matter to discuss. Who should she contact? The developers? The Scrum Master (SM)? Wait for the PO to come back? Other? I have a heretic answer to this question.
Agile Why do I prioritize a product using epics instead of user-stories or initiatives? Have you ever seen a toddler, who can't yet crawl on all four let alone sit upright, already able to peel shrimps with a knife and a fork? I would love to witness
Agile The Nokia Test A few weeks ago, I discovered the "Nokia Test", two simple sets of questions to respectively check if you are doing iterative development and if you are doing Scrum. Alone the
Agile The league of extraordinarily shortsighted agile superleaders Last year in November, I wrote about the league of extraordinarily shortsighted agile superheroes. Back then it was more a thought experiment than anything else, a try to prune my mind and try
Retrospective Team-centered user story retrospective Each year I experience the same issue, let's call it the "Xmas Reset". Everyday is an eating festival. Family and friends get the best of us. The holidays seem to hit
Agile Play4Agile 2017, four days to go Have you ever heard this sentence? "If you can tell the difference between work and play, then you are doing one of them wrong" * In our agile & creative line of
Podcast Host on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast In May 2015, I showed up as a guest on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast. I've told you all about it here already. About a year later, I met with Vasco Duarte, the
Coaching My mum was in fact my first agile coach During my teens, one character trait my mum showed, invariably made me flip out: her tendency to over analyze things. She had the incredible talent to pull out the philosophical thoughts, psychological trends
Agile The secret behind the asympotical-everything's-fine chart 2 years ago, I published a blog post called why you shouldn't burndown tasks instead of storypoints. It started like this: Even if it is really tempting: don't burn down tasks... ever! A
Agile Re-inspect and re-adapt Do you inspect and adapt on yourself? Have you ever read a book twice? Have you read the agile manifesto recently? When was the last time you realized you were wrong? In Hamburg,
Agile Hey public speaker, how cool are you when you speak? Cool, calm and in control. That's how I've held my last talks, both on the outside... and almost on the inside. Last June, I held my DevJourney talk at the .NET Day Franken
Book "Agility is a new hype" said Poh, "new?" answered Piglet Last summer, I read one book. This is memorable enough to be noticed. I am an avid audio-consumer (either Podcasts or via Audible as you might remember) but cannot seem to make much
Agile The league of extraordinarily shortsighted agile superheroes The Marvel lore is full of unknown superheroes. Do you know the league of extraordinarily shortsighted agile superheroes? They show up in projects, pull our their superpowers and save the day. They are
Agile The "iterative" fallacy Yesterday, this tweet from Dan Creswell showed up in my timeline: Iteratively developing software is not equivalent to adding features a sprint at a time So simple. So concise. So expressive. Yet I
Agile Pain driven development When you have a problem in an agile environment, you first try to hack the world around it to make it visible. Make verbal communication and silent promises appear on the walls, use
Agile The mysterious case of the anti-Agile Scrum The last two projects I have worked on as a Scrum Master and Agile Coach, had a common ground: they were fixed scope rewrites. Wait, rewrites? Fixed scope? Isn't that in exact contradiction
Book [Book] Master of (scrum?) formalities (Sci-Fi) I listened to another audiobook recently called Master of formalities, a fun story from Scott Meyer, author of the Magic 2.0 series I already reviewed here. Here's the pitch taken from Amazon:
Scrum Scrum, but you're doing it wrong!!! You're doing SCRUM wrong! And what is Scrum after all? ... I've had this discussion once too many times, I had to put some thoughts down on paper. Often enough I've heard said "
Scrum Stand-up and keep typing One of the artifacts prescribed by the Scrum framework is the daily Scrum, also known as "Daily Standup". Daily stand-ups are very useful, but come with a price tag. What if
Agile What do we do now? How to start that next project of yours [Disclaimer: acid tone inside :P] Hey, you've been promoted to a new and exciting project? How nice for you. Congratulations! No irony. Almost. Unless you've been downgraded to this project and then it
Comics [Comics] One more reason we need unicorns in the wild Have you read the Lean Startup book from Eric Ries? I think it goes well hand in hand with my Developer's Journey project. In order for a startup to succeed, you need not
Comics [Comics] On backlogs Taking care of a backlog is a damn hard task. Keeping the priorities up and having enough to feed a hungry developer platoon isn't funny either. Sometimes one find some strange backlogs where
Agile [Comics] Being a coach Being a coach is all about listening, observing and picking up details. Sometimes it requires extra care, sleeping on it, gathering the right data or even luck of being at the right place
Agile To whom are you speaking to? A few weeks ago I interviewed Max for developers journey. By scrolling his blog I found an article called 'You're brilliant, stay humble' that's deeply resonated with me. It talks about why it
Retrospective Speed-dating Retrospective It's been a while since I shared yet another crazy retrospective format that we tried. Here's a new one, the "speed dating retrospective". This format makes it mandatory for everyone to