Why does writing user stories have to suck so much? I recently heard from a colleague that they were looking for some ideas, tricks, tips and techniques to make user story writing more innovative so they can build a delightful product. Definitely a good idea, but running a good meeting ...
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I have been working with a colleague to develop a new course for ScrumMasters (and other Agile change agents) and we were talking about possible objectives for this course, who would attend and what is missing from our current offerings that this class could provide. As we discussed these ideas ...
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Right before Agile 2011, I had the opportunity to co-train a CSM course with an awesome candidate to join the ranks of Certified Scrum Trainers, Karen Greaves. One of the reasons why I was interested in training with Karen is that she has been applying many of the Training From the ...
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One of the things I admired about Extreme Programming (XP) was the simplicity of the roles defined in the Green Book. In XP, there are only two roles: Customer and Programmer. When you are using XP, the Customer makes business decisions, Programmers make technical decisions and one role may not substitute ...
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I do a lot of work with Scrum Teams and the ones that struggle the most are the ones where the Scrum roles are defined poorly and\or not filled properly. Scrum is a balanced framework and when the roles get muddled, the framework begins to adopt the dysfunctions of the ...
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A Sprint Burndown chart is a simple tool used by the Team to provide a measurement on how close they are to meeting the Sprint Goal by the end of the Sprint. Burndown charts are common in Scrum and are simply the trend of work remaining across time in a Sprint, a ...
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I had an interesting conversation today with one of the software testers in China who was having difficulty understanding some planning concepts in Scrum. She wanted to know if a Scrum team finished all their work early in a Sprint, would it be OK for the Team to take some ...
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