In James Clear’s book Atomic Habits he refers to the practice of “environment design” for helping you change your habits. The idea being that your environment plays a big role in whether you succeed or fail in adopting a new habit e.g. …
Firstly, this post is a massive shoutout to all single parents, parents with multiple kids, parents working multiple jobs, working in places with less-than-satisfactory employee rights, living as expats with little or no support network — and generally anyone who needs to look after a dependent while also holding down…
I’ve not come across many teams that use, let alone know that much about throughput. …
If you’ve read my article “Scrum Master’s don’t own the process”, you might then ask what exactly are we held to account for?
Our profession is sometimes thought of as not having any “skin in the game”. If we are not directly affected by outcomes, then doesn’t that mean we…
Shouldn’t we estimate spikes and bugs? What about “ghost work” like time spent on professional growth? Maybe we should re-estimate tasks that we partially completed? What if we associate story points with hours worked? That would make it easier for us to know how many story points to remove when…
Despite what many job descriptions say these days, as scrum masters or agile coaches, we are not enforcers. We do not own or overtly control the process that our teams use. We are coaches.
A revision of the scrum guide in fact now even better reflects this. It went from:
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While story points are a common method for estimating in software development, the problem is that they are a seemingly difficult concept to grasp. Yet, ironically, because they have become somewhat of a best practice, teams can often be a bit reluctant to try anything else; as if story pointing…
As an Agile Coach, I often ponder organizational structure. In particular, I find hierarchies intriguing. I work in one, yet because of my profession am sometimes considered part of a community that is seen to overtly reject them. But what is a hierarchy really? …
I’m going to talk about something briefly that isn’t revolutionary. It’s not new. It’s not mind-blowing. But it is, I feel, one of those things that when said “out loud” makes you nod your head in guilty silence.
More often then not, the product backlogs that I see are enormous…
