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Forgotten XP values

When Agile Sweden had its Christmas party one of the lightning talks was on how some of the XP values seems to have been forgotten now that agile is becoming more and more mainstream. I think we all can agree that agile is much about communication and Read More...
Posted Saturday, January 03, 2009 9:00 AM by cellfish | 0 Comments
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Getting your priorities right

I think an important thing about being agile a great developer is to make sure your backlog is correctly prioritized. This both means that everything should have updated priorities where business value is the key factor. It also means that each of your Read More...
Posted Monday, November 24, 2008 11:24 AM by cellfish | 0 Comments
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Constraints as User Stories

A few months ago I wrote a little about constraints as an alternative to user stories. Constraints are what many of you know as non-functional requirements . Today I read an interesting post by Mike Cohn where he argues that you should write your constraints Read More...
Posted Saturday, November 22, 2008 11:22 AM by cellfish | 0 Comments
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Should you track completed effort for your tasks?

Many (agile) projects uses a burn down chart to track remaining time. It is a commonly used visualization "tool" for progress. But there are also teams that keep track of completed time for each task. Typically they do this in order to see how the completed Read More...
Posted Friday, October 24, 2008 7:55 AM by cellfish | 0 Comments
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Scrum Gathering Stockholm - Day 3

The day started with Ken Schwaber talking on the topic: It is not Scrum if... Basically he tried to correct a number of common misunderstandings from his books. I then attended a breakout session on retrospect concepts . It was nothing new but a few things Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 22, 2008 8:00 PM by cellfish | 0 Comments
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Scrum Gathering Stockholm 2008 - Day 2

So the second day was (almost) all about open space sessions. First out was a session on Agile Games and I hoped for a discussion on their usefulness. Turns out the organizer had it all planned and wasn't really interested in any discussion. He just wanted Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 21, 2008 8:45 PM by cellfish | 1 Comments
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Scrum Gathering Stockholm 2008 - Day 1

So the first day of Scrum Gathering has come to an end. I just wanted to check in with a few first impressions. The opening session with Jeff Sutherland did not only cover the announced topic; Secret Sauce for Making Scrums Hyperactive . He also talked Read More...
Posted Monday, October 20, 2008 10:42 PM by cellfish | 0 Comments
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Positive reports

Military combat is not the only military concept where software development can learn. One thing we used in my unit was "positive reporting". Positive reporting means that we should report in to our commander often and not only when things go wrong. This Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 07, 2008 8:00 AM by cellfish | 0 Comments
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The army is agile!

Up until recently I was a platoon commander in the Swedish national guard. Since all peace time activities in the Swedish national guard are based on work done voluntarily I applied a number of agile principles when running the platoon. I used a task Read More...
Posted Sunday, October 05, 2008 10:05 AM by cellfish | 1 Comments
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A summary of an Agile 2008 summary

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. Read More...
Posted Saturday, September 20, 2008 9:20 AM by cellfish | 0 Comments
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Being agile when there is no project

Sometimes I come across a team saying; " We can't use Scrum because there is no project. We just do what needs to be done on a daily basis." These are typically support teams, teams with a large support responsibility or teams with a lot of small projects Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 20, 2008 8:50 AM by cellfish | 0 Comments
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How to avoid having too much work in progress

Most teams I worked with have at some point had a lot of work in progress. Sometimes virtually the complete sprint back log have been in progress . This is definitely a bad sign. The reasons for this situation to arise are many. It can be bad break down Read More...
Posted Monday, August 18, 2008 7:35 AM by cellfish | 1 Comments
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Spending money to improve team productivity

When adapting to agile philosophy some managers get carried away and want to spend some money on improving the team productivity. Especially if you have an external consultant coaching the team, the manager tends to ask the coach what they should buy. Read More...
Posted Sunday, August 10, 2008 8:10 AM by cellfish | 0 Comments
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Constraints - when user stories don't do it for you

In "agile projects" it is common to use user stories to describe what has to be done. But it is also common to use constraints to describe things that cannot be described in a user story. This can be things like: Response times should always be less than Read More...
Posted Saturday, June 21, 2008 9:15 PM by cellfish | 0 Comments
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How to set up an agile work space

I stumbled across this video with a tour of the Patterns & Practices team at Microsoft. I think it shows pretty good how you can create a good team work space. Spanning from occupying conference rooms to rebuilding your office for a million dollars Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 10, 2008 9:02 PM by cellfish | 0 Comments
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