The Evolution of Done

Posted by David Bland in agile, lean, scrum on March 11, 2010

Many of you are probably familiar with the concept of done as it relates to iterative software development. It comes in many flavors, from working lines of code to acceptance criteria, and can change from tasks to features to releases. While I agree as a community we should continually grow the definition of done, only [...]

, , , ,

4 Comments

Everyone Has a Voice in Retrospectives

Posted by David Bland in agile, retrospectives on March 1, 2010

It can be difficult to get team members to be vocal in retrospectives. I’m always wary of the stronger personalities controlling the conversation, and I’ve found that going around the room calling people out by name can have mixed results. After reading a recent article on effective retrospective formats, I decided to write my experience [...]

, , , ,

9 Comments

It’s an Agile Sabotage

Posted by David Bland in agile, enterprise on February 25, 2010

Agile adoptions in the Enterprise are difficult and complicated, perhaps that is why I often read stories on Top Down vs. Bottom Up techniques. I feel as though we focus too much on these and overlook the Middle, which can lead to disaster. Middle management is arguably the toughest obstacle in any large scale Agile [...]

, , ,

4 Comments

Sizing Up the Enterprise

Posted by David Bland in agile, enterprise, scrum on January 24, 2010

As teams begin to estimate User Stories, they may explore different approaches such as T-Shirt sizes and Fibonacci sequences that stop at 8 or go much higher. This freedom to choose a relative sizing style allows a team to adopt what fits well within their work environment. While this flexible approach is quite useful at [...]

, , ,

6 Comments

An X on the Agile Waterfall Lifeline

Posted by David Bland in agile, waterfall on January 20, 2010

Over these last few months, I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with people across the country about their thoughts on agile transformations. In doing so, I noticed a recurring theme. We tend to categorize companies, or subsets of companies as Agile or Waterfall. At best, openly categorizing in this manner is an over simplification; at [...]

,

1 Comment