Fans of the Prairie Home Companion radio show will recognize the closing statement from the show that the community of Lake Wobegon is “…where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.” The last part, while appealing to its fictional Read more…
Perhaps the most cited reference defining and supporting Agile thinking is the 1986 Harvard Business Review article by Takeuchi and Nonaka, “The New New Product Development Game” (the first “new” is for the new process, the second “new” is for new products created by the process). It is this article Read more…
Business generally seems drawn to simple models and metaphors for understanding and communicating complex principles and organizational behavior. This leads us to everything from Porter’s 5-Forces Analysis and Myers-Briggs personality dichotomies to Who moved my cheese? and “peeling the onion.” Certainly, software development is not immune to this behavior and Read more…
If we hypothesize that neither Scrum nor Agile are project management, then what are they and what is their relationship to project management? Answering these questions requires defining several terms. I have previously defined Agile as sets of values and principles governing software product development methods given in a document Read more…
In the canon of Agile metaphors, we find this model of minimum viable product (MVP) and incremental development in solving transportation needs. The model suggests that it is better to create more quickly achieved products that meet minimal elements of the overall need than it is to build directly toward Read more…
When Scrum rituals are used without a deep understanding of their purpose, they can degenerate into hollow activities done for the purpose of following the form, but without creating their expected benefits. For example, I have seen many sprint retrospectives following the form precisely that produced nothing more substantive than Read more…
It is often true that the common understanding of the terms “Agile” and “Scrum” are conflated leaving the impression that the terms vaguely synonymous and can be used interchangeably as in the pictured web article below. This is unfortunate as it obscures the important differences between the practices and can Read more…
There is a lot to agree with in Leon Tranter’s Myths of agile: “there’s no documentation in agile”. And yet there is a new myth inside the debunking of the original myth. Among the many fine arguments supporting the use of documentation in Agile projects and advocating using Agile philosophy Read more…
While a popular conception is that Agile methodology opposes the creation of documentation, most mature Agilists disagree, including the originator of the Scrum approach. In Sutherland’s OOPSLA ’95 paper, the first to define Scrum, he describes a robust design and documentation phase called the ‘pre-game’ occurring prior to the beginning Read more…
I often use the process of chartering projects as an example of the application of pragmatic project management. Project charters are a commonly used tool for initiating a project that capture critical information needed to gain sponsorship for a project and to begin work. There is some variation in the Read more…