Browsing Posts in Working in an Agile fashion

What do all of these tales have in common? They started out as an idea that led to a small change. These changes could be implemented easily, cheaply and quickly when there was complete buy-in from everyone that the change was necessary and for the better. Of course, I didn’t always find myself in a [...]

A home entertainment provider called me in to facilitate User Story writing followed by release planning. The business unit had not tried either activity before. Leadership had been replaced and the new General Manager and Vice President of Technology decided to invest in the group’s burgeoning Scrum effort. The organization followed a structured work breakdown [...]

Being an independent contractor is exciting yet somewhat lonely, having to support myself and find every opportunity. I look to constantly improve my craft by finding others to collaborate with and have found those needs met by joining Rally. I now concentrate on improving my coaching and training practice with other coaches. We have a [...]

A balance was reached between steady, persistent teams who felt comfortable in the code, and the capability to move people around to share knowledge.

A consequence of teams not being able to say when something might be done resulted in other people setting deadlines for those teams.

person covered in post-itsNothing had been deployed to production for over a quarter now. There were around 600 open bugs, and technical debt mounted with more being opened than closed.

I agree The rate that we were now building the product at had our team estimating we would have something out after the date in the contract.

We learned that keeping the backlog sized is priceless and that reassigning points is useless.


I asked if people could hold off with the questions until the end of the Sprint. It had become too much of a distraction for the team.

Stand-ups took too long, where we did more talking than we should. Sometimes it took us over an hour for everyone to answer the three questions.