April 8, 2014

My Recent Posts on LeadingAgile

I started working with LeadingAgile in 11/2012 on some complex enterprise agile transformations and other lean management consulting. Related to that, I've done most of my recent blogging over there on LeadingAgile's blog. Here are some of those posts:

I Don’t Estimate Software Defects, but it's not as simple as just that. If you follow my advice, you'll also have a zero-defect mentality and you'll fix defects as soon as you find them. In general, I want a conservative measure of velocity, so I don't record in my velocity anything that was unplanned. Therefore, I likewise Don't Estimate Spikes.

I'm fond of The Theory of Constraints and Brooks’ Law. In that post I evaluated Brooks' Law in light of the Theory of Constraints in a way that I hope helps the reader understand both concepts.

Lack of Predictability is Your Biggest Problem. The senior leadership in most organizations I work with seem to agree. They aren't very interested in agile's agility. They want their design-build-test teams and their program teams to be able to make and meet commitments so they can make appropriate capacity constrained commitments across the portfolio and to external stakeholders.

Agile Health Metrics for Predictability was perhaps my most popular post on LeadingAgile's blog.

In Bottom-Up Implementation & Top-Down Intent, I discuss my recommended approach to agile transformations.

Related to that, I wrote a post arguing that you should fix your Structure 1st: Why You Should Not Start With Practices

Part of your structure involves your design-build-test teams, also known as your Scrum teams. In Use Feature Teams. Yes, Use Component Teams I explaining these approaches and why I recommend using both.

What do Scrum teams do during the Release Sprint? Good question. This post has the answer. In short, many things, but not developing code that can't be tested immediately.

Oh, I also published an article in Agile Journal entitled Identifying and Improving Bad User Stories along with my friend and co-author Chuck Suscheck. We put another article up on sticky-minds: The Problems with Overachievers on Agile Teams.