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WorldCup 2014 Retrospective: The Magic about Mindset and Leadership
This weekend preparing this blogpost, I ran into a brilliant quote from Johan Cruijff. At a conference a few years ago for the Dutch local government, he told a great story about a talented blind...
View ArticleMarketing scrum vs IT scrum - a report published and presented at agile 2014
As we know, Scrum is the perfect framework for IT / software development projects to learn, adapt to change and deliver great software of value, faster. But is Scrum also usable outside of software...
View ArticleKanban should be the default choice for DevOps teams
We had a successful workshop on DevOpsDays 2014. Our main point was that Kanban should be the default choice for DevOps teams. The presentation can be downloaded here. DevOpsDays 2014 was a success On...
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Scrumban
Scrum has become THE revolution in the world of software development. The main philosophy behind scrum is accepting that a problem cannot be fully understood or defined at start; scrum has the focus on...
View ArticleA Valuable Sprint Review (a.k.a. Demo): How To?
A valuable Sprint Review (from now on in this blog referred to as Demo) can be built in three steps. It starts during the Sprint planning session with agreeing on and understanding the user stories on...
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Little's Law in 3D
The much used relation between average cycle time, average total work and input rate (or throughput) is known as Little's Law. It is often used to argue that it is a good thing to work on less items at...
View ArticleAgile 2014 – speaking and attending; a summary
So Agile 2014 is over again… and what an interesting conference it was. What did I find most rewarding? Meeting so many agile people! My first conclusion was that there were experts like us agile...
View ArticleBE Agile before you Become Agile
People dislike change. It disrupts our routines and we need to invest to adapt. We only go along if we understand why change is needed and how we benefit from it. The key to intrinsic motivation is to...
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Help! Too Many Incidents! - Capacity Assignment Policy In Agile Teams
As an Agile coach, scrum master, product owner, or team member you probably have been in the situation before in which more work is thrown at the team than the team has capacity to resolve. In case of...
View ArticleSynchronize the Team
How can you, as a scrum master, improve the chances that the scrum team has a common vision and understanding of both the user story and the solution, from the start until the end of the sprint? The...
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Continuous Delivery is about removing waste from the Software Delivery Pipeline
On October the 22nd I will be speaking at the Continuous Delivery and DevOps Conference in Copenhagen where I will share experiences on a very successful implementation of a new website serving about...
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Become high performing. By being happy.
The summer holidays are over. Fall is coming. Like the start of every new year, a good moment for new inspiration. Recently, I went twice to the Boston area for a client of Xebia. I met there (I...
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Why 'Why' Is Everything
The 'Why' part is perhaps the most important aspect of a user story. This links to the sprint goal which links ultimately to the product vision and organisation's vision. Lately, I got reminded of the...
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New daily stand up questions
This post provides some alternate standup questions to let your standup be: aimed forward, goal focused, team focused. The questions are: What have I achieved since our last SUM? What is my goal for...
View ArticleReady, Test, Go!
The full potential of many an agile organization is hardly ever reached. Many teams find themselves redefining user stories although they have been committed to as part of the sprint. The ‘ready...
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(Edu) Scrum at XP Days Benelux: beware of the next generation
Xp Days Benelux 2014 is over, and it was excellent. Good sessions, interesting mix of topics and presenters, and a wonderful atmosphere of knowledge sharing, respect and passion for Agile. After 12...
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About snowmen and mathematical proof why agile works
Last week I had an interesting course by Roger Sessions on Snowman Architecture. The perishable nature of Snowmen under any serious form of pressure fortunately does not apply to his architecture...
View ArticleThe End of Common-off-the-Shelf Software
Large Common-of-the-Shelf Software (COTS for short) packages are difficult to implement and integrate. Buying a large software package is not a good idea. Below I will explain how Agile methods and...
View ArticleExtreme Engineering - Building a Rube Goldberg machine with scrum
Is agile usable to do other things than software development? Well we knew that already; yes! But to create a machine in 1 day with 5 teams and continuously changing members using scrum might be...
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Agile: how hard can it be?!
Yesterday my colleagues and I ran an awesome workshop at the MIT conference in which we built a Rube Goldberg machine using Scrum and Extreme Engineering techniques. As agile coaches one would think...
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