I have once again this weekend been drawn in to reading articles and discussions on LinkedIn, mainly discussing how Scrum=Bad, KanBan=Good, or KanBan=Bad and ScrumBan=Good, and a variety of similar content that frankly is just noise to 99% of the people involved in Agile Software delivery. The reality is that most software professionals really don’t […]
I participated in a great discussion this week on the use of WiP limits. For those that don’t know, WiP stands for Work in Progress, and is a measure of how many activities you have started but not completed. It is important to note that this is not a measure of how many tasks you […]
I recently presented at a conference on the topic of Work in Progress (WiP) limits, and in particular Little’s law. As part of I gave a demonstration and from it drew the conclusion that WiP limits have no direct bearing on velocity. This caused some controversy so I’ll try to explain again here. Applying Little’s […]
It may sound overly simplistic but in my experience products generally succeed or fail in correlation to the effectiveness of Product Ownership on the team. Mainly because we under-appreciate the importance and the difficulty of the Product Ownership aspects in the product creation process. In my opinion the choice of this role is far more […]
Have you ever noticed that late projects only ever seem to get later? Why is it that any gains get absorbed and delays get compounded? Let’s say I have a mini-project where I have a builder adding a kitchen to a house, he will construct the walls and then I’ll have a plumber come in […]
A question I have been hearing a lot lately is how do you know whether an employee is putting in their hours, or not slacking off. This question seems to be particularly concerning for people in the context of working from home where the perception is that it is more prevalent. The irony here of […]
There are two ships traveling a busy shipping route, each ship has a complex engine and the engineering team has a chief engineer. Both ships are a similar age and size. The first ship has a very busy chief engineer running this way and that, fixing any and every problem that comes up, he knows […]
I have a theory that in the context of self-organizing teams in a business environment, there are zones of diminishing responsibility and thus the effectiveness of self organization as the tasks get further from the perceived core purpose of the team or individual. That is to say that a self-organizing software development team may have […]
NoEstimates has made a lot of traction over the last few years, with good reason, it is primarily about adopting Agile properly, delivering the valuable work in order of priority and in small chunks, and by doing so eliminating the need for a heavy duty estimation process. If we are only planning for the next […]
There are two ships traveling a busy shipping route, each ship has a complex engine and the engineering team has a chief engineer. Both ships are a similar age and size. The first ship has a very busy chief engineer running this way and that, fixing any and every problem that comes up, he knows […]
I have seen a number of articles recently that refer to the stages of remote work or maturity of your remote team as a linear progression to only one possible Nirvana. The Nirvana in question appears to be 100% independence, 100% asynchronous communication and no need to ever have any work-related human contact at all. […]
There is an ongoing debate about whether or not to use Estimates in your software development process, largely fueled by #NoEstimates, but as is often the case the battle has been picked up by many that have become over zealous without fully understanding but with great certainty tell you that you should never estimate. There […]
Monte Carlo Forecasting is a method for creating predictive forecasts based on a technique of repeatedly running random simulations of the samples to see a range of possible outcomes, and then to use those outcomes to forecast results of larger (or future situations). The predictive model offers a percentage probability of being in certain ranges. […]
The last few months have been pretty busy for me and so I have dropped out of the online community for a while. Over the Christmas break I had some free time and so I ventured back in, caught up on some reading and tried to get a feel for the common issues of the […]
