-
Slides from my talks at VSLive Redmond 2012
Thanks to everyone who came to my talks at VSLive Redmond 2012. As promised, here are the slides for my talks. Top 10 Ways to Go from Good to Great Scrum Master The Scrum Master role in an organization can be difficult. You live between a rock and a hard place. You’re influential but you…
-
Scrum vs. The Time Zone
I had a call from a prospective customer about a month ago — let’s call him “Bob” — asking for advice about rolling out Scrum at his organization. It didn’t go well. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that it didn’t go well because Bob started by asking pointedly, “are you one of those…
-
“Scrum Under a Waterfall” at ALM Chicago
I’m presenting my “Scrum Under a Waterfall” talk today (2/22/2012) at ALM Chicago. Here’s the abstract: It would be so easy if everyone at our companies just used Scrum — or at least Agile. No one would lean on the team for dates and deadlines, and everyone would know that change is a good thing. …
-
Scrum: “It’s easy enough if you can figure out what to build.”
The quote, “it’s easy enough if you can figure out what to build” comes out of an on-going discussion about project management that I’ve been having with my wife. Her background is in biomedical engineering and she’s always been a little envious that (as she sees it) software is such a certainty. In biology and…
-
SDTimes: “Moving software architects into the business analyst role”
I got interviewed for an article in SDTimes a while back and it just dropped. The article talks about the changing duties of the software architect with an emphasis on Scrum and Agile. (Thanks to Victoria Reitano for giving me a call.) August 8, 2011 — (Page 1 of 4) The role of the software…
-
Scrum vs. Kanban: It’s All About The Complexity Of The Task
A few months ago I did a Scrum vs. Kanban session at VSLive Las Vegas 2011 with fellow Scrum Trainer, David Starr. It went well and I’m just now getting around to posting the slides. (Better late than never, huh?) The Scrum vs. Kanban Cage Match Scrum and Kanban: Apples and oranges or evil twins?…
-
Scrum: Don’t Combine The Scrum Master and Architect
My Redmond Developer News column went up last week. This month I talked about the danger of having one person be the Scrum Master and the Architect/Tech Lead. Here’s a small quote: In a well-performing, healthy Scrum team, the Scrum Master is there to help the team be productive by functioning as the keeper of…
-
Scrum Dysfunction: Beware of the Rewrite Project
I recently wrote a short article for Redmond Developer News talking about the difficulty that teams commonly have using Scrum when tasked to re-write an existing application and it just got published. At first glance, you’d think that a Rewrite Project would be easy but I see team after team get crushed by this kind…
-
Creating a Project Backlog: Breaking down product ideas and requirements in to TFS2010 User Stories (PBIs)
It’s kind of amazing how much hidden detail and complexity there is in even the simplest software product and application ideas. I lead a .NET user group that meets in Cambridge, MA called Beantown .NET. Although I delegate some of the management of the group to other people, it essentially is my responsibility to schedule…
-
Scrum Developer Training at Microsoft Mountain View, 11/2/09 – 11/6/2009
And in other Team Foundation Server 2010 news… Microsoft has teamed up with Ken Schwaber (scrum.org), the Scrum Alliance, and Accentient to create a course aimed at Scrum teams called the Scrum Developer course. This 5-day course teaches teams and individual developers how to effectively implement Scrum using Team Foundation Server 2010 and Visual Studio…