The social standup

Reading about a new idea for remote standups in the Thoughtworks Tech Radar reminded me of a few similar experiences I've had.

Scrum is like riding a bike with training wheels.

Over the years I've grown to dislike Scrum, mostly because I've seen it abused and misunderstood. And an approach that makes it easy to screw up is not a good approach in my opinion.

Slow tests, courage and zombie driven development

When I was going over my old posts from January 2009 I had a flashback of how I for a while aimed at posting something every other day. Today I must say quality may have suffered from that and I apologize... So here are the highlights...

Prioritizing, responsibilities and open source

November 2008 had a lot of fun reads and I had a great time going over all those old post. But a few things stood out apart from the $1,000 I apparently spent on fraud prevention fees for US visas.

Military LINQ, Time and pointers for kids.

Wow, I was apparently very busy blogging in October 2008. While there are some things that I will not cover below that might be worth reading I wanted to highlight a few things. Both good and embarrassing stuff...

Prioritizing, Sleeping and Interviews

September 2008 wasn't a bad month for my blogging.

Kanban and rants

Since I apparently got carried away blogged a lot in August 2008 I have to pick a few of the more interesting posts from that month and see if there is any update to be made. I guess that also means that by definition the things I don't mention today are not that interesting any more...

TeamSnippets review

This is for anybody out there looking for information on TeamSnippets since you are considering using it. Short version; I don't see why you would want to use such a service.

ET/U/LP over MVP

Well sometimes my life is easy. Or you could say I'm cheating because today I'll just hand it over to somebody else...

Books, Mocks and Open Source

So time to look back again and update some old opinions from May 2008. This time I'd like to talk about three old articles.

Assigning vs picking tasks

If you have followed this blog for a while you know how important I think the choice of words are. But the difference between assigning and picking tasks within a team might be bigger than than you think.

Don't hold me accountable for old opinions

Once in a while I get a comment about something I wrote a long time ago and sometimes that is embarrassing as the opinion I expressed a while back might not be how I feel today on that subject. Hence I decided to look into some old blog posts and see how bad it is...

Yet another retrospective idea: Successes, Frustrations and Opportunities

During a training I was teaching recently we were talking about retrospectives and different ways to make them interesting. Afterwards one of the students came forward and suggested something interesting.

Sprint forecast over commitment

Every team I've ever been on that did Scrum (or ScrumBut) have always used the term sprint commitment when it comes to describing the result of sprint planning. Commitment is however a bad word.

What is the best time of day for stand-up meetings?

Daily stand-ups. Either you love them or you don't. I have tried a lot of different times of day for it and a lot of people wonder what is the best time to do it? But before I answer that I have to remind you that daily stand-ups is the daily planning meeting for the team - not a reporting meeting.

Team Health Check

Teams are important.

Two types of lazy

I recently updated a bathroom in my house and being given my interest in agile software development and craftsmanship I always find it interesting to work with painters etc since they in theory are the role model for craftsmanship. While greatly impressed by the tile guy the painters surprised me with a new level of laziness.

Stop estimating or?

I was listening to this Swedish podcast where the episode (episode 8) was titled "stop estimating" and since I hate estimates I started listening with high expectations. Naturally the title was chosen to be provocative but I was surprised that the message was actually to stop estimating.

My favorite book for agile teams

Whenever I have worked with teams or Scrum Masters there has always been one book that I have recommended them to read. And now I'm happy to see that it has been updated.

Are you burning up or down?

You have probably heard the term burn-down and burn-up when referring to two different ways of tracking progress against some target in agile projects. but have you heard about the enhanced burn-down?