Mitch Lacey's Scrum and Agile Blog

As I coach more and more teams, people keep saying what they wish they had when they started their agile adoption. Not surprising, there is a pattern here. I looked back at my notes from almost 10 years ago when I first adopted Scrum and XP and, oddly enough, many of the things I hear today are on my list from years ago. Lets dive in.

How to integrate rework into your everyday life while building software and why it’s key to success.

In the world of Scrum it’s fairly common for organizations to quickly jump into practicing the agile methodology and then become frustrated or disappointed when they don’t see significant immediate results.

Agile aficionados seem to have it out for the old faithful waterfall process. For years now, they have claimed that a requirements document can’t ever be complete, that you can’t possibly know everything upfront, and that waterfall’s guarantees of on-time delivery are false. Where do they get these crazy ideas?

You’ve just finished a great story-writing workshop with your stakeholders. You’re excited about the new product and are anxious to get started. Until, that is, you get back to your office and look at the mountain of stories that you’ve somehow got to estimate and prioritize. All your excitement disappears as you face the hard truth: You have no idea where to start.

We hear quite a bit that Scrum teams \“need\” full time Scrum Masters, but rarely do we see teams that get them. Why? Several reasons, but the biggest one is usually money. Why should a company pay for someone to keep a team healthy?

There is no one-size-fits-all, magic bullet for determining a sprint length that works well for every team. Originally, Scrum called for one-month sprints, but nowadays many teams have been successful with two-week or even one-week sprints.

I went to Sweden for Microsoft TechDays a couple weeks ago and right before I left I found out my sessions were at the end of the day on both days, which was fantastic! I thought to myself – should I change over to the local time zone, which was nine hours ahead of my home time zone of Pacific?

We put a lot of emphasis on being Renaissance workers, able to step comfortably from one job role to the next. But, as I describe here, not all roles play nicely with each other, and trying to combine them may lead to disaster.

On my first team in 2005, and teams ever since, I have noticed a trend in the Daily Scrum meeting where people will say things they think the other team members want to hear. I found this disturbing as you can imagine, and I found a solution to prevent it.

People often ask why they should work on a Scrum team if their companies base rewards on individual efforts. This raises the question, how does Scrum help the individual?

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.

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?

Colleague Jean Tabaka posted a question recently that asked “How we can motivate these people as much as possible before having them leave the newly anointed agile organization?” The context around this question is that there are people who are viewed as hero’s in organizations. These individuals “are very specialized individuals with knowledge outside just the software development realm (physics, mathematics, fluids mechanics…) These individuals are used to being highly prized for their very specific subject expertise. They have a sense of significance hooked onto their unique role.”

I wrote a paper for the 2007 PMI Global Congress in Atlanta on Agile Transition. Part of the paper covers the Agile Manifesto. As I began researching and writing about it, I found that I had gaps in the historical data on the web. I was fortunate enough to interview Jim Highsmith, Ward Cunningham and Ken Schwaber via telephone to get a better understanding of how the Agile Manifesto came about.

Mixing Scrum and Waterfall will provide you an interesting mix… This is one of my older MSDN posts from August, 2006. Enjoy. :)

Growing up, I had a dream of being a photographer. I didn’t know why I was drawn to it, but it was something I wanted to do. I bought my first camera when I was 10 years old – it was a Kodak Disc camera. My second camera was a Konica TC Autoreflex – it was my first real camera. I worked a summer for my dad at the wonderful rate of $2.50 per hour – I thought it was good for 11 years old. As I got older, I became more into photography.

As parents, we can all relate to the challenge of keeping kids motivated and on track. To make it easier, why not use agile techniques right in your own home? This tried-and-true blog post from 2006 shows you how - trust us, its timeless advice has been put into practice with a variety of families since then!