Tweet When we ask an experienced scrum master, product owner or developer define a user story, they usually understand that “…every user story must be INVEST-able…(taken from B. Hartman’s post)”. When we further elaborate on the “INVEST” part, we discover that splitting a user story is done vertically (along features), not horizontally (along components e.g. … Read more
Tweet Lets kick off this post with the quote from another recent discussion that generated a number of strong comments from experienced professionals: “…as long as companies remain complacent and reliant on outlived staffing/head-hunting approaches, cold-calling techniques, and ineffective HR-screening processes, performed by people that poorly understand the essence of an agile coaching profession, while trying to … Read more
Tweet If you were a company’s CEO and had a very clear and urgent need to improve your organization, to stay competitive and successful in a marketplace, and therefore, were looking for guide-level senior advisers and coaches, whom you could trust and rely on during your challenging journey, who would you choose: people on the … Read more
Tweet Examples of Command & Control behavior can be historically traced back into centuries, to the periods of dictatorship, imperialism, monarchy, feudalism and even further back, to more primitive social systems. However, for the sake of this discussion, let’s refer only as far back as Industrial Revolution of the last century. Back then, workforce predominantly … Read more
Tweet These days, almost everyone knows that organizations cannot “do” agile; they can “be” agile. And today, this contrast is used not just by agile coaches and scrum masters. Everyone likes building this fancy figure of speech in their daily lexicon: managers, analysts, developers. Great!!! Below is a snippet from Wikipedia, defining the word … Read more
2017 Scrum Coaching Retreat in Kiev is in the books!!! The event has brought together a few dozens of agile coaches and trainers from nearby and far away. The participants came from different backgrounds and focus areas but due to everyone’s extensive experience in self-organization and self-management, got the show on the road very quickly. After … Read more
What is the best Sprint length? Who decides on Sprint length? Are there any exceptions? What are some of the most common mistakes people make, when making decisions about Sprint length? Let’s start from grassroots and answer the following basic question: “What is Sprint main goal?” And while looking for an answer, let’s refer to … Read more
The 2017 Agile Maine Day event is in the books. Great event organization. Great energizing crowd. Amazing presenters and speakers. Below are the summaries of two selected presentations, whose themes were mostly relevant to System Thinking and System Design: Don Macintyre’s topic “Agile Leadership” was about Radical Management (Steve Denning’s teaching) and covered: Shifting focus from making money … Read more
As per Scrum Guide, “…Scrum is a framework for developing and sustaining complex products… It [Scrum] is lightweight, easy to understand and difficult to master”. The guide talks about basic Scrum, or Scrum by one cross-functional team that works for only one Product Owner, on one single product. The guide also mentions situations when multiple … Read more
Virtual networks of professional agile coaches and trainers is good place to pick up some most thoughtful and provocative agile discussions. The most reputable networks that I know of, and happen to belong to, are the communities of: Certified Enterprise Coaches and Certified Scrum Trainers (both, from Scrum Alliance), and Candidate Large Scale Scrum Trainers … Read more
