Author: JEM

The Optimal Retrospective This article isn’t about whether Agile teams should have a retrospective meeting or not. There is plenty of material on that already. I’ll assume that it is generally accepted practice to ensure the team communicates and finds ways to continuously improve. This post is about achieving the BEST possible retrospective meetings and … Continue reading The Optimal Retrospective

For teams doing scrum, without a scrum master I had a client ask me the other day if it was ok to "rotate" the scrum master role since they don't have a dedicated one. He felt strongly this was the right approach. Partially to lesson the distraction to one team member and also to have … Continue reading What to do without a dedicated scrum master?

Are your retrospectives getting boring and monotonous with dis-engaged team members? It could be that you have mastered high performance and your teams have no room for improvement….  although I doubt that is the case.   In fact, I believe teams can get better indefinitely. So how do you keep the retrospectives productive over time? … Continue reading Getting More From Retrospective Meetings

I recently had a client ask me about a metric that they started using with their teams.  The metric was “stories in progress" for more than 6 days.   And after seeing a long list of  teams that had multiple stories open longer than 6 days, they wanted to understand why. Here are some of … Continue reading How Long Should a User Story Be ‘In Progress’?

I've been using and preaching Vertical Slicing of stories for a long time now and I still come across teams that don't do it or don't really see the value in it. I recently had a conversation with a PO from a team who gave me his perspective on the practice. To set the context, … Continue reading Vertical Slicing. A Success Story

Becoming truly Agile and enjoying high-performance teams takes a lot of effort and is a huge challenge for many companies. It requires agreement and alignment of executive management all way down through the individual contributors and including cross-functional teams.   What are some of the biggest hurdles that slows down Agile adoption?  All too often … Continue reading Are Your Leaders Slowing Agile Adoption?

When Agile teams aim to create work items, sometimes it can get a bit confusing if the right roles are not focused on the right things.   For example,  discussions can jump to technical implementation too quickly and get into the weeds.  Or a requirement can be discussed before a Product Owner really understands the reason … Continue reading Composing Work Items Effectively

For companies that want to provide value to its customers early and often, the focus needs to be engrained in the teams building the products.    Everyone on the team should be focused on value, which will help lead to better User Stories and more valuable product increments. When planning to release a new feature … Continue reading Customer Value Engineering

Estimating software projects has been a challenge for a long time. Estimating in hours is frequently inaccurate and requires a lot of upfront work before engineers are comfortable even giving an estimate.  Design work and requirement details are needed and it usually yields mediocre or poor results. Agile recommends a different approach referred to as … Continue reading Estimating with Story Points