What is the proper size and time for an Agile Retrospective?

I often hear the same complaint about Agile Retrospectives: They are not held at the right level in the organization! Or, at least, that is the conclusion that people draw from one fact: Many issues brought up in the Retrospective need resolution at a much higher level in the organization.…

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Agile is Always Appropriate

Sometimes, people tell me that “Agile is not appropriate” in this or that context. I believe that’s plain wrong. Agile, as seen from the basic principles, is always appropriate. That doesn’t mean that all versions of agile are appropriate in all situations. And it doesn’t mean that you will be sucessful just because you use agile. And saying that you are agile doesn’t mean that you are. Are you agile? Perhaps this is the source of the confusion?

Key Agile Practices You Need

Laurie Williams presenting a slide. She is the researcher behind the list of Key Agile Practices.

Laurie Williams has presented a “top thirty” list of key agile practices. The list defines what you need to do to be seen as being agile. Continuous integration, short iterations and done criteria are at the top of the list.

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Agile is NOT new and not enough

So people keep talking about the Agile – Waterfall dichotomy. About agile and un-agile practices. I decided to have an unscientific look at what Agile isn’t. If there is a true dichotomy between Agile and Waterfall, then things opposite of Agile should be either entirely out of scope for projects…

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Agile Training, Best Enjoyed Fresh

When I perform Agile Training I do it as a part of a larger Agile Coaching engagement with a customer. I do it as a directed intervention based on my ongoing diagnostic of how things are actually working at this point in time, with this client. I am a huge…

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Agile Estimation Units (revisited)

A team estimating their next iteration using planning poker. What agile estimation units are they using?

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The link between agile research and practice

How good is the link between agile research and practice? Not good enough I guess. Follow this interesting discusison on LinkedIN.

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My Journey towards Becoming an Agile Driver

A car turned over in the road.

What’s an Agile Driver? I have always been driving kind of ad hoc. Getting from A to B with no particular plan. If I were a programmer you would call it “cowboy coding” but I’m not, so we can call it “cowboy driving”. People, everyone it seemed — my boss,…

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Agile Configuration Management

I love configuration management! “But”, you ask, “isn’t configuration management boring?” Well, configuration management can be boring and tedious if you do it manually. With modern tools it is not all that bad. Even if it is boring, that is out-weighed by the sheer importance of proper agile configuration management for a successful software development team.

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Agile Estimation Units

Coffee cups as agile estimation units.

Which agile estimation units should you use? You can use any arbitrary units to estimate backlog items in an agile project. It does not matter if you do your estimation with story points, ping pong balls, man days, man hours, kLoCs. After a while your teams will converge on a…

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