Two words, Agile and coaching, seem to be the most-used buzzwords (after brain and neuro) of the last five years or so. The way things are progressing, I see them staying at the top of the list for decades.

Quality: It's one of the common commercial arguments made when offering a software product. Those who have already mature products in the market justify their careers by emphasizing quality. Other companies, perhaps with more innovative products o...

Agile, and Scrum in particular, are buzzwords. Everyone wants to try out Scrum and reap its benefits. Clients (especially business clients) see a big advantage in not having to wait till all the requirements are carved in stone before starting a p...

When quality assurance teams and management who have adopted Agile practices first put the ideas to work, they face a significant impediment in unlearning the traditional mind-set and practices that experience in traditional practices has instilled in them.

A widespread myth I've noticed in Agile software development is, No documentation in Agile or Documentation is wasted effort. Particularly during a transition from Waterfall to Agile, we appreciate the benefits of adopting typical Scrum practices, such as short iterations, timeboxing, daily scrums, retrospective, and so on. We also try to get away from the tasks and activities that we found monotonous before Agile adoption documentation, writing proper code comments, etc. But is it really correct to completely stop documentation and code comments?

I was at home a couple of Sundays ago, watching a Chelsea vs. Liverpool football match (soccer, for those Americans reading) a match Liverpool ultimately won. It was during the post-match analysis that I was struck by some parallels between what Chelsea is going through and my own current client engagement to move from Waterfall to Scrum.

I've always wondered -- not just as a developer but as a human being -- why I needed to follow the orthodox methods of typical hierarchical reporting. There was always some middle man confusing the conversation. You can define many roles in a typical hierarchical organization, and

A question I've heard often is: Is it correct, in Scrum methodology, to track an individual's performance? This question has only one answer: No. Tracking and measuring the productivity of a single member of an Agile team is against the spirit of Scrum. The real question should be...

Every day, product owners face the challenge of coming up with the correct acceptance criteria to help the team understand the story. During the acceptance testing, you almost never fail to hear from the team that the acceptance criteria were eith...

When someone tells me, A Sprint is mini Waterfall, I quickly respond, No! And I do this often, because time and again I hear this opinion from people who are new to Agile. I even hear it from...

How to lead a comfortable, productive, and prosperous life: Its a centuries-long tradition that humans have learned from nature which took billion of years to form. So, does nature offer any management thoughts on how to build a large scale...

On my journey to become a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST), Ive met a number of helpful and knowledgeable people. For those of you who may not know, part of the plan to become a CST consists of training with other current CSTs. One n...

Agile teams estimate story size during Release Planning and estimate efforts for tasks during Sprint Planning. This is perhaps true for most Agile teams while some of them have different approaches based on the training and/or coaching they ha...

By: Benot Pointet Thomas Botton Dealing with a large amount of user stories (more than your fingers and toes can account for) is not easy, most often they sit one after the other in your product backlog, or they are shuffled on a ...

There is no such role as project manager in Scrum. But there are project managers in the organization. So what is the project manager supposed to do when the team is transitioning to Scrum? The easy part is that this question has already been ...

We executed our project in a Scrum manner without even knowing our method was Scrum. What initially looked like an impossible project was delivered in six months, with exceptional customer satisfaction and confidence all around. Background A...

Identifying the problem It's difficult to change learned behavior, and even harder to change group habits. This is one reason I've had so many difficulties establishing Scrum in different companies in Germany. Most of my clients understand th...

As we know, Agile testing is not a completely different testing procedure but a software testing practice, following the principles of the Agile life cycle. How? Its most salient aspect is that it emphasizes testing and close work with the e...