Studies* show that certain memories help us learn and remember more effectively. Combine a course with a team building exercise, an appraised movie, and you have something amazing - a training with lasting impact. This is exactly what we wanted to achieve with the first Bosnia Agile organised Scrum.org Product Owner...
The Antibiotics of Software Engineering – Agile Testing
Surgery is not a recent invention, it dates back millennia. Notable Milestones in Surgical History (http://surgery.about.com/od/surgeryinthemedia/a/HistoryOfSurgeryTimeline.htm)6,500 B.C.E. - Skulls found in France show signs of a rudimentary surgery called trepanation, which involves drilling a hole in the skull. 1540 C.E. - English barbers and surgeons unite to form The United Barber-Surgeons...
Agile A3 Sprint Report
I really enjoy working with A3 Reports. They have the habit of making you to distill out the crucial information, to really drill down.There are different kinds of A3 reports. The book 'Understanding A3 Thinking: A Critical Component of Toyota's PDCA Management System’ describes three different report types. Problem-, Proposal-, and...
An Agile Transition done Right
A little over a year, I kicked off an agile change program at a leading swiss devices company. Two weeks ago, I had a chance to visit them during an open house on their new premisses.This company was fully committed to walk the talk, they decided to do what needed...
PSD (Java) First Run
Most Scrum implementations fail or have limited success for one reason. The team is not able to really deliver a potential shippable product increment according to the definition of done. This causes all kinds of problems down the road. One of the main manifestations is that the the sprint cadence...
Productive Meetings
Don't know what your experience is like, but for me it is the following. Meetings are much more productive when someone is standing at a white board and writes down ideas, risks, problems and what have you. I am sure every single human being who has attended enough meetings has...
Pomodoro Technique
About one and a half years I made a huge mistake. A mistake which cost me lots of productivity. One and a half years ago I read about the Pomodoro Technique and was excited about its approach. I even printed out the free PDF. My mistake was to totally forget...
Are you Ready Ready
I’ve been to the Scrum Gathering in Munich this year. In his keynote Jeff Sutherland describes how he gets Scrum teams hyper productive. Essentially, you need to get your stories to Done Done as fast as possible. However, often too many unknowns do exist when a user story is being...
Discipline == Habit
From Wikipedia:Habits are habituated routines of behavior that are repeated regularly, tend to occur subconsciously, without directly thinking consciously about them.Self-discipline refers to the training that one gives one's self to accomplish a certain task or to adopt a particular pattern of behaviour, even though one would really rather be...
Business Analysts are Important
I've always been convinced that User Stories are the way to describe feature requests. It just felt natural. IEEE 830 specification are just too ambiguous. Use Cases, even far more verbose, are often too large by covering all possible flows and exceptional cases. User Stories just fit the bill.Writing good...