Agile 101 for business students

Yesterday I had the great pleasure of speaking to two undergrad business classes at the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce.  The students are primarily accounting and finance majors, with a few engineering majors thrown in for good measure.  I...

Speaking at XP2011

I’m getting very excited for the XP2011 conference coming up in Madrid in May.  I was also very excited to have my lightning talk on range estimation accepted to the conference.  If you’ll be at the conference, I hope you’ll stop by! My lightning...

Scrum in Schools

Tonight at the AgileCville user group meeting, we discussed Scrum in Schools.  This was a roundtable discussion of group members, and it was very interesting.  Paul Erb kicked off the discussion for us.  Paul is an Agile Cville regular, as well as the business manager...

Burning hours and points together

About a month ago I was working with a team planning another iteration for the project, when we had an interesting discussion about how to manage our burndown. On all of our previous sprints, our burndowns were based on hours.  That is, for each day of the sprint,...

The Iron Triangle revised to reflect people

I had coffee with a fellow software consultant friend recently where we traded war stories about recent IT projects. Jay told a tale familiar to many of us (Jay is not his real name, but the story is all too real).  He and his team had just recently finished a project...