I had the good fortune to sit in on a day long session with Dave Hussman (who is awesome, by the way) on the topic Agile coaching as a lead in to the Atlanta APLN meeting . It was chock full of tips and I recommend getting out to see Dave if and when you get the chance; he packs a lot of knowledge into...

We've rolled out Kanban at my company Xclaim Software. Prior to this we were following a more-or-less XP process evolved and tweaked over some two years. Even though our team has been doing the Agile thing with good results, there are times that the process seems a little opaque and wasteful. I've...

Where do bugs fit into your iterations? This is a discussion I’ve had on many occasions with many different people. Laribee mentioned they work bugs as soon as they come in. I believe Bellware told me the same thing. Provost and Newkirk both told me they get bugs prioritized into the backlog along...

Something I’ve been thinking about lately, as I’ve been going through reams of paper on lean, kanban, kaizen and Toyota Production system concepts, is how the definition of done differs from that we are used to in Scrum. In Scrum, the product owner gets with the rest of the team and the come up with...

The term just reeks of steady state management. I find the idea of an "Agile shop" or an "Agile team" is a little misleading and misses the point. What we want is an "Agile organization." The main feature of Agility, to me, is the ability to respond to change: to follow...

I'm drilling pretty deeply into Lean these days. Scott Bellware turned me on to some of the more primary sources about lean manufacturing (Ben Scheirman does a good job of summarizing these books based on a recent conversation at ALT.NET). Since then we've had a bit of an "asynchronous book...