Let the Agile Rebellion Begin

Silhouetted soldiers walking through dust at sunset

If you can hear this, you are the resistance. I’m going to make a bold statement. Traditional development is dead in the software industry, but it just doesn’t know it yet. A rebellion was started long ago, and we’ve been fighting a decades-long war against the Waterfall Imperial Army. A line was finally drawn in…

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What’s a manager’s role on a Scrum team?

manager with Scrum Team

Did you know the word “Manager” does not show up once in the Scrum Guide? If I were a manager in a Fortune 500 organization with a mortgage and two kids in college, I’d be concerned for my job. In this blog post, I’ll explain how it’s possible for managers to work with Scrum teams…

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5 things people get wrong with user stories

Woman gesturing ‘no’ with crossed arms beside a laptop

When user stories are used well, they are a fantastic tool. When they are used poorly, they are a horribly burdensome micromanagement tool. Here are 5 things I commonly see people get wrong with user stories. 1. Prescribing solutions in user stories Have you ever seen a user story like this? As a user I…

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Being nice isn’t always nice

not nice

I recently performed an organizational agile assessment and learned a great deal about how they served their customer’s technology needs. We investigated their technical practices, processes to develop and release, but also dug deep into how the people worked together from the people side of things. What we discovered was fascinating. Everyone in the technology…

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Your Agile adoption needs to be agile

Feedback buttons

Agile adoptions stall for a number of reasons. On the surface, it may seem that there is a cultural mismatch, that people don’t like change, or that people just don’t have time available. Although those things must be addressed for change to take root, we have found that it’s often the process for getting people…

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