Software Best Practices

A discussion on the LinkedIn Certified Scrum Master board led me to read an article on Mike Cohn’s blog titled, “It’s Effort, Not Complexity.” Mike argues that stakeholders don’t care about how hard it is to do something, they care about how long it will take. Fair enough...

Dear Construx: How do you deal with the risk of Story Point inflation throughout a Scrum project? My team goes through release planning, ending up with a backlog where each item has been estimated using story points. Based upon our estimates of story points and team velocity, we predict, and commit to...

One thing I’m often asked is, how do you come up with valid project estimates in Scrum? After all, Scrum doesn’t want you to worry about more than the current sprint, does it? The basic rule of estimation is, estimate size/effort/complexity and then derive duration. For Scrum, we follow the industry...

One question that I often hear is, “Do we have to implement Scrum by the book, or should we adapt it to our environment?” The answer is, “Yes!” You should do both. And, they are not mutually exclusive. To me, 'keeping Scrum pure' means adopting the three roles, four meetings, four artifacts,...

Learn how to streamline production with fast, effective Waterfall, RUP and Agile processes and how to use mixed software development strategies to meet specific project needs: Waterfall, RUP and Agile: Which is Right for You?

The more I work with companies that are struggling with Scrum, the more I’m starting to believe that ‘hybrid’ Scrum adoptions, where people pick and choose which Scrum practices to follow and which to ignore, invariably lead to failure. Whoa! you say… Wait a minute! Agile is about doing what is right...

…and start solving them. Sounds great, but what does it mean? What’s the difference between managing a problem and solving it? I recently held a workshop on using Scrum to drive process improvement at CIISA 2009 , held in Guadalajara, Mexico, where I focused on using Scrum as a process improvement...

First, on a personal note, I had the misfortune to tear cartilage in my right knee a couple days ago and will require surgery to repair/remove it. I'm hobbling around on crutches for the time being. I hope I can still attend (and present at) Agile2009 . Anyway, my review of Mike Holcombe's book...

I'll be presenting at Agile2009 in Chicago on the Tools for Agility stage on Tuesday 25 August, 4:45pm-5:30pm. Here is my session description from http://agile2009.org/node/2762 WANTED: Seeking Single Agile Knowledge Development Tool-set Aren’t code, backlog-items, tests, designs & documents...

This question came-up in a discussion earlier this week: Do we know of published studies on this subject? A quick Google-search turned up the following for me ... George Dinwiddie 's page on Studies of Test-Driven Development has links to a dozen or so, with summaries A March 2009 InfoQ.com article...