Getting Agile

In the agile community there are some common practices that are either seen as valuable or to be avoided. Two of those practices are estimation using Planning Poker and Sprint Planning task breakdown. The focus for many teams in these practices is on the estimates themselves and how “accurate” they are. It has been my [...]

Tomorrow at 1:30pm I will be discussing my paper published by the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference 2009 in Portland, OR on “Managing Software Debt: Continued Delivery of High Value as Systems Age”. I have uploaded the slides for this presentation and I hope that some of the new content will help those looking for [...]

During an interview at the Better Software conference this week, I mentioned that I thought maintaining a single list of work prioritized by the business was important for our industry to improve. The following text is an excerpt, in first draft form, from chapter 2, “Architecture Integrity”, of my upcoming book “Architecture in an Agile [...]

AgilePalooza is a one day Agile conference on Friday May 29th at the San Francisco State University downtown campus. There will be two tracks: Learning Agility and Advancing Agility.
“Learning Agility” will be presentation style whereas “Advancing Agility” will use the open space format.
Speakers include David Hussman (DevJam), Chris Sterling (SolutionsIQ), Luke Hohmann (Enthiosys), Lee Henson [...]

I have been using a tool for some time with clients and teams to find out what software quality attributes the product development team should focus on in the project. ISO standard 9621 describes the quality attributes found in software. The following image shows the 6 categories and specific attributes contained within them.
Before I knew [...]

Have you ever heard or said any of these phrases?

We are going to implement the Scrum methodology.
We’re doing a modified Scrum.
Our developers are using a Scrum process.

These may seem like innocuous statements but they are indicators of potential misinterpretation of how Scrum is best utilized. Scrum is not a full development process (although almost anything [...]

For some time I have described team velocity as a:
function of (sprint length, team makeup, sizing nomenclature, product)
Given these parameters to team velocity, how can each affect team velocity when modified?
Sprint Length
It is common for teams when they first implement Scrum to have difficulty with short sprint length. They are probably not used to [...]

I have uploaded the talk I did at SD West 2009 on Yahoo! Video and here it is:
Managing Software Debt – Chris Sterling @ SD West 2009 @ Yahoo! Video

The hopefully-not-anticlimatic second event of the still-pretty-new BeyondAgile is happening on Thursday:
“Agile Challenges Clinic/Swap Meet”
Thursday, 26 March 2009
6:30 to 8:30 p.m.
Locations on the Eastside and Seattle!
Read on for agenda and location information, or visit our Google Group at
http://groups.google.com/group/beyondagile
The Blurb
At the first event, everyone (over forty people) created a backlog of ideas, suggestions, and work items. [...]

When introducing Scrum into an organization with many teams there are usually questions about particular roles and how they will work with teams. Questions that I have heard in the past are:

I work on features that cut across all or most of the teams, how can I possibly work with all of them?
I am the [...]