Some of the things that I've written about publicly in May 2023:Some teams think that they have matured beyond the need for coaching, but the organization should think about the long-term and addressing turnover, growth, and other changes when deciding how to staff coaches.The knowledge and background needed by a coach depends on what type of coaching they are expected to provide.There is middle ground between "build, release, and fail fast" and "go live with a complete... more

A collection of things that I've written about in April 2023:When someone in a coaching role is bogged down by organizational processes, the options are to change your organization or change your organization.A lengthy backlog isn't always a concern by itself.Goals are a useful focusing tool. If all the players don't want to collaborate, those who do can still craft a goal and use it to guide their work, but it is important to get the right stakeholders involved in developing... more

A selection of posts I've written in March 2023:Sprint 0 or Inception activities in Scrum.Balancing time and effort to understand and define work with deciding late and minimizing waste.Measuring achieving goals as a measure of performance.Estimating completion dates and agility are at odds.Benefits of tracking resolved defects.Systematically managing technical debt.Standardization of tools and processes is a business... more

A selection of posts that I wrote in February 2023:Don't invest too much time in learning story points. Although good from a historical perspective, there are better estimation and forecasting techniques.The maximum size for a Scrum Team is somewhere around 9-12 people. (1, 2).When teams grow too large to effectively work as a single team, the team is in the best position to determine how to decompose. However, frameworks like LeSS, Nexus, Team Topologies, and FAST Agile can give the team... more

A sampling of things that I've posted in January 2023:Product-Mode versus Project-Mode for structuring funding and work.The amount of the Product Backlog to keep refined and ready for a Sprint.Assessing the value and usefulness of work in a Product Backlog.Considerations for scaling Scrum.Writing automated unit tests for accessor and mutator methods.The difference between "test item" and "feature to be tested".Implementing a risk-based testing approach.Developers... more

A sampling of posts that I've made in December 2022:Machine code generation tools have come a long way, but there are still too many open questions before they are safe to use in production systems.The need to run regression tests with unchanged software, but newly instantiated infrastructure depends on your configuration management practices and your appetite for risk.Selecting a method for rebuilding/rewriting an existing system and the use of estimation techniques based on that... more