One interesting thing I've heard over the last years ( and again the other day ) is that a lot of teams that have implemented Scrum and have become very successful with Scrum often end up with a feeling that iterations are unnecessary. Some teams take the leap away from Scrum and starts working in a...

People love sending email at Microsoft. So you need a good strategy to handle it. At work I use a strategy similar to what is described here . My key principle is that the inbox should only contain things I need to address. If I cannot address it in a few days I archive it flag it so it ends up in my...

In Scrum you never extend a sprint. Read that again. Never . So why do some teams extend their sprint a few days sometimes? I think the most common reason is there is some functionality that is almost done and it feels better delivering "in a few days" rather than "at end of next sprint". Might even...

I was involved in a discussion on what it means when a team commits to something. In this particular case one person thought that it meant the team will do what it takes to deliver this . I on the other hand I meant the team thinks it can deliver all this and will try to do it . A big difference. Yesterday...

Henrik Kniberg recently posted a number of comic strips describing the essence of Kanban pretty well. Using humor is not only funny, I think it makes the message stick a little bit better. The only downside with this comic is that it might not make all that sense if you have no idea of what Kanban is...

Yesterday Henrik Kniberg published this draft on Kanban vs Scrum . I think it is a great article describing the differences (and similarities) between Scrum and Kanban so you should take the time and read it since there are times when a Kanban approach is better than a non-Kanban approach (and vice versa...

I didn't have the opportunity to attend the recent Agile 2008 conference in Toronto but I attended a summary presentation a few weeks ago. These are the key points that excited me. Celebrate your failures! People typically feel bad when they fail at something. But if nobody knows you've failed...