22 February 2010

The Scrum Alliance has hired Enthiosys, Luke Hohmann's company, to run a series of Innovation Games to help the Scrum Alliance prioritize it's backlog. You can play here. I was not sure how this would go. I have played this game called Buy a Feature before and liked it, but what is going on now is unmoderated. Is it worth your time?

12 November 2009

Thanks to everyone who attended my workshop at SQE Agile Development Practices 2009 in Orlando titled “Practicing ScrumBut: Ensuring Project Failure” and special thanks to Cory Foy for coming up from Tampa to do the workshop with me.

09 November 2009

I am always amazed when I ask people what they think the job of a manager is. I get answers like “to tell people what to do” to “stay out of the way” to “do my performance review” to “lead”.

The last one is always of interest to me. Do companies hire managers or do they hire leaders?

25 August 2009

Thanks to everyone who attended my Agile 2009 talk today on company culture and social deviance. The slides are available for download in PDF format on the resources tab.

18 March 2009

After many delays, I have posted my 14 day Sprint timeline diagrams. Please see the reference tab above and look under Scrum Resources. I will update these with small requirements over the next few months as I revisit and rethink some of the words.

06 March 2009

Ward and Jim get together at Agile Open Northwest in Feb 2009 to talk about CI and merge. Worth the eight minute watch.

See the video here

09 January 2009

In November, 2008 there was a discussion on the Scrum Development yahoo group about how Scrum benefits the individual, and why anyone would want to work on a Scrum team. Here is what was asked:

21 November 2008

A big thank you to everyone who attended my talks at the SQE Agile Development 2008 Conference in Orlando, Florida.

You can download the slides on the resources page or you can grab them here:

• Mixing Roles in Scrum: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly
• Are We There Yet? Defining Done

16 November 2008

Many people ask me about team spaces and how to set them up. Not long ago, colleagues Ade Miller and Ajoy Krishnamoorthy did a walkthrough of the Microsoft patterns & practices space - it is built around agile teams. When watching this video, consider that this team started out in a two person office with 6+ people crammed in it. From there, they began booking conference rooms, one room per team member per day. They were told they could not do this, so they got creative and started booking random times to ensure the conference rooms (aka team space) were always available. This went on for a couple of years before facilities asked what they needed to stop the madness. This video shows you the end result of a team room.

Click here to see the video on MSDN Channel 9.

30 October 2008

My colleague Ade Miller at Microsoft just published a paper titled Distrubuted Agile Development at Microsoft patterns & practices. I had a chance to read draft versions of the paper and find it a good read.

You can download the PDF here

Here is the abstract:

Distributed development is a fact of life for many teams. Unfortunately most agile methodologies or approaches assume that the team is located in a single team room. Until recently there has been little guidance about how to apply these approaches with a geographically dispersed team.

Microsoft’s patterns & practices group has been following an agile, distributed development approach for the past five years. During this time teams within the group have experimented extensively with different approaches to best address the challenges of distributed agile development. This paper outlines the challenges faced by geographically distributed agile teams and details some proven practices to address these issues and build successful distributed teams.