Splitting user stories effectively is a capability which is not easily grasped without practice. J. B. Rainsberger describes some of the difficulties in his article and how a team can progress to effectively doing so meeting the INVEST model developed by Bill Wake.

For those who have found value in using Planning Poker, as described by Mike Cohn in his book “Agile Estimating and Planning”, and would like to use this through a service for distributed teams, here is the site for you.

Brad Appleton provided a series of articles on Software Configuration Management (SCM) using Lean principles. Here is a list:

• Lean Principles for Branching
• Nested Synchronization and Harmonic Cadences
• Codeline Flow, Availability, and Throughput
• Codeline Merging and Locking: Continuous Updates and Two-Phased Commits
• Continuous Staging: Scaling Continuous Integration to Multiple Component Teams

Mary and Tom Poppendieck correlates project planning in Lean construction projects to software project planning in this article. The lessons provided by construction project management activities and the reasons for their existence give those conducting software planning food for thought.

The Daily Scrum is an essential part of the Scrum framework. It is a 15 minute time-boxed activity where the whole Delivery Team gets together every day. Simon Baker gives a detailed analysis of the Daily Scrum as he has seen it successfully done in this article.

Mike Cohn, of Mountain Goat Software, has published materials presented and taped from the Bay Area XP users group meeting on March 20, 2007 at Google. You may find the presentation materials here and the YouTube videos here and here.