Author Archive

We’ve come a long way together. My hope is that you have been implementing many of the recommended practices and “things to try” throughout the book. If so, you’ve hopefully made a lot of progress. You’ve established an Enterprise Tran- sition Community (ETC) to introduce Scrum into your organization. The ETC, in turn, has created [...]

Soon after beginning your effort to adopt Scrum, someone will ask, “How are we doing?” This is not a question with a simple answer like, “We’re doing great.” Similarly and fortunately, you cannot distill your answer down to, “We’re Scrum level three.” Adopting Scrum is a complex process, and answering how you’re doing at it [...]

To achieve long-term success with Scrum, the implications of becoming agile must be transferred into other parts of the organization. When this is not done, organizational gravity—those influences that formed the organization into whatever shape it existed in before the start of the transition—will kick in. I have seen Scrum transitions stalled or completely stopped [...]

It’s one thing to look at agile software development in a test tube; it’s another to experience it in the real world. In the test tube, agile methodologies like Scrum are easily adopted by all members, and the nasty realities of corporate politics, economics, and such cannot intrude. In the real world, though, all of [...]

A few years ago, collocated teams were the norm and it was unusual for a team to be geographically distributed. By now, the reverse must be true. Personally, I’m now surprised when someone tells me that everyone on the team works in the same building. With the prevalence of teams that are spread across the [...]

My wife, Laura, cooks dinner nearly every night. Some nights she makes something a bit fancier; other nights, if she’s more rushed, she cooks something simple. But it’s always tasty, healthful, and prepared without a great deal of stress. Except for Christmas dinner. Cooking Christmas dinner is stressful. The house is full of guests—her parents, [...]

Early into my career as a programmer, I left my large, stable employer for an eight-person start-up. I went from a well-funded environment where we had a separate testing and quality assurance organization to a company where I was only the second programmer; there was not a tester in sight. Sometime during my first week [...]

“We’re agile, we don’t plan” and “We’ll be done when we’re done” were common statements in the early years following the publication of the Agile Manifesto. I suspect that many people on some of the early agile teams that took this stance knew that they were giving up something valuable when they threw planning out [...]

Like all of the agile processes, Scrum is an iterative and incremental approach to software development. Although the terms iterative and incremental each have a unique meaning, they are often used together. Let’s briefly tease them apart so we can better understand their meanings. Chapter Contents Deliver Working Software Each Sprint Defining Potentially Shippable Identifying [...]