The Agile manifesto states “Working software over comprehensive documentation” – this seems to be one of the biggest mindset shifts that organisations need to make when adopting any Agile framework. For some people that simple statement brings up visions of chaos, lack of control, and the worst fear...

Conducting an interesting and engaging end-of-sprint review is an often overlooked art: Not only do we want to show what we have built during the last sprint and collect feedback and good ideas for what to build next; we also want to give our audience a good experience. At my workplace we always in...

One of the things that immediately caught on when we started our journey towards being Agile at Snapper was the use of visual workspaces. The team loved the sense of achievement of moving a task from "In Progress" to "Done" and found the board helped them stay focused and co-ordinated. Everyone from...

After my last post on the role of the Scrum Master I have been asked if I could write a similar role description for the Scrum Product Owner. Here’s my view of the role: The Product Owner The product owner is a visionary who can envision the final product and communicate the vision. The product o...

The idea For quite a while I have been waiting for an opportunity to try a 5-why root cause analysis in a sprint retrospective. The 5-why analysis has its origins within Toyota and lean manufacturing and is used to find the root cause of a problem through identifying a symptom and then repeating th...

Last week I presented at WebDU in Sydney. The conference was excellently organised by Geoff and the Daemon guys and I met lots of interesting people. And I love Sydney! In short I had a blast. Apart from a workshop on user stories I presented on 10 ways to fail with Agile. Judging by the Twitter str...

The other night I attended Rashina Hoda’s totally awesome presentation “Agile Undercover: When Customers don’t collaborate” at the Wellington Agile Professionals Network. Rashina presented the research she had conducted on the basis of interviewing 30 people across 16 organisations in New Zealand an...

Recently some of the teams I’m coaching found it difficult to distinguish between acceptance criteria for user stories and the definition of done. Here’s my attempt to make the distinction clear: For a user story or feature to be "potentially shippable" it needs to meet the expectations of the Prod...

To get our code to production what is left to do is to turn the "potentially" releasable product into a releasable product. To do this a number of activities are required: Which ones and how much effort they require varies greatly between types of organisation. The fastest way to perform rollout ac...

One of the teams I have recently coached quickly got a grasp of how to phrase user stories but found it hard to relate to the concept of acceptance criteria. I wrote this short FAQ as an attempt to make it easier for my team to work with acceptance criteria and hope that other teams might find this...

One of my clients is a small software development house that does custom development in the form of development projects for clients . I helped them to successfully introduce Agile (Scrum with XP) and both the team and business managers are really happy with it. As they liked our methods of plannin...

There’s a saying in software development “If someone gets hit by the red bus ... “ which roughly translates to that if you lose a project team member or two you still want to be able to get the work done and finish the project. Normally, red busses are rare: The realistic worst case scenario is...

I was recently asked by a friend how to pick an Agile team. My friend is a project manager within a New Zealand government department and to deliver an important project he was given complete freedom of choice with regards to project methodology and people. He chose Agile and Scrum as a delivery fr...

People keep asking me whether I’d run all projects using an agile framework such as Scrum. When I answer “of course not” they often not only expect but gently try to steer me towards an answer that excludes certain type of projects: “You certainly wouldn’t use it for a mission critical system, woul...

When I started with agile (Scrum) software development five years ago one of the main challenges I faced was combining an agile development approach with user-experience driven website design. Especially, as we were working on a global, consumer-oriented web site with a strong focus on product bran...