What's the deal with story points and agile estimation techniques, and why can't we just improve our estimates over time? That's part of the question that a friend of mine asked recently, and I'm going to respond to it in this blog post....
The Innovate Virginia conference will be held in Richmond, Virginia, on Friday September 16th, and I am proud to be one of the speakers there. It will be an excellent one-day conference bringing together many excellent speakers in a cost...
This past Tuesday at AgileCville we had a series of lightning talks on "Agile for Newbies." The meeting went very well, and I'll provide a brief recap of it here. Thanks go to RallySoftware, who sponsored the meeting this month and...
Have you ever been asked for a rough estimate, and then later regretted giving a "rough" estimate because the customer tried to hold you to it? A familiar story This week I spoke with an agile coaching colleague of mine, and he relayed a...
Have you ever faced prioritizing a long list of stories or requirements and thought, "This is going to take forever!" I have, and so I was thrilled to learn a technique at XP2011 that helps with this dilemma. I had a chance last week to...
Thanks to those attending my lightning talk today at XP2011 on range estimation! I'm enjoying Madrid Spain very much and the conference has been very good so far. Here are my slides from today's talk in PDF and Powerpoint formats. In the...
On Wednesday September 28th, I'll be speaking at the Verify/ATI Conference 2011 in Arlington Virginia at the Crowne Plaza Hotel. According to the recently published schedule at the VerifyATI website, I'm in the 2:15-3:15 time slot. I'll...
As mentioned in a previous post, we played a game last night at AgileCville's meeting last night that was fun and definitely kept the conversation going. We had some very good discussions around a number of agile topics, and so that...
Let's play an agile game! Tomorrow will be the next Agile Cville meeting at OpenSpace in Charlottesville, from 6-8pm. The topic this month is "Agile Failure Patterns", and I agreed to kick off the discussion. Rather than start off the...
Last month the QANews newsletter by Sogeti was released, and I was pleased to have an article I wrote on Agile Database Testing published in it. I've reproduced the article below, and you can also see the original article here. Agile...
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...
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,...
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,...
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...
I'm pleased to announce an online course that I have put together for how to lead and plan fixed price Agile projects and still be profitable. I first announced this in a webinar I held recently, and I'm excited to open it up to a wider...
I've heard other Agile Coaches say that leading a team through any change is as much about coaching them on their personal interactions as it is training them on the mechanics of Agile methodologies. I was reminded of that insight when I...
That Sinking Feeling When a project starts to go wrong, you know it well before you admit it to yourself or your customer. You know that feeling when you start to realize you don't have enough budget, time, or the scope is unachievable?...
Have you ever heard that oil and water don’t mix? It’s pretty common knowledge that oil will float on top of water and the substances will not mix together. This simple chemistry is easy to demonstrate, and most of us learned it in...
If you are a consultant, even on an Agile team, you probably have to track your hours. I used to hate tracking my hours - and I've seen first hand how it can demoralize people. I once worked at a company where they decided to build an...
Over the last year or so, I've been considering all the various lessons that I've learned throughout my IT career, and in particular during the last few years as I've really embraced Agile methodologies. I realized that there is a...
You may have heard it said that the best Agile teams are cross-functional in nature. That means that each person on the team is capable of working in multiple functional silos (database, service layer, presentation layer, testing, etc). A...
If I could promise you returns of 6:1 on a project in a single year, would you take it? That is a pretty impressive return for a project, and most businesses would be happy to run a project that will yield that sort of return....
I'm pleased to announce the official launch of AgilityFeat Inc. I've started this business so that I can apply my years of experience as an IT leader, entrepreneur, developer to coach your team to deliver more value to your customers. I...
Note: This blog post was originally written when I was a consultant for OpenSource Connections. A couple weeks ago I went to the Agile2010 conference in Orlando, and it was a really great experience. I really enjoyed giving my talk on...
Note: This blog post was originally written when I was a consultant for OpenSource Connections. Recently I wrote a blog post on why software developers are typically so bad at estimation. I also gave a preview of the presentation that I...