Have you ever been in a flamethrower war? I sincerely hope you have never been in one like the picture, but if you have been there serving for the US armed forces, then thank you for what you did for our country! Most of us have not been in a literal flamethrower war, but some of us have been in our share of them in the virtual world. I may be showing my age, but we used to have a phrase for arguments on message boards: flame wars or flaming. They were all the rage when a social network was really a Usenet newsgroup. Now we’ve grown up to using fancy mailing lists from Google and Yahoo and we still have the same core issues around disagreements. People will make statements in a message that they would never make in a face-to-face environment.
There were arguments about agile even before the Manifesto for Agile Software Development was created in 2001 by 17 brave individuals (some of whom I’m honored to be able to call friends). Lately, I’ve come to realize that the world of arguing around agile hasn’t changed in the past 10+ years at all. The players have changed, but not the fact that we can’t all get along. In the past year I’ve seen “discuss-ments” (give me credit if you use my made up word!) around all of the following issues: [Read more...]

Is success or failure really a choice? I don’t think it is at all. Pretty much no one chooses to fail. Unfortunately, we can’t just choose to be successful either. What we CAN choose is to try to make a success out of a failure! The old saying “Make lemonade out of lemons” really is a good way of looking at things, especially for agile teams.

Is the bug to the left a large bug or a small bug? It looks HUGE to me! Well, in reality it is probably between .5 and .75 inches long. Not really a very big bug at all. Why do we care? Because trying to size the fixing of software “bugs” is at least as hard as figuring out how big this bug is!
What’s wrong with the user story on the card? It seems to have everything we need: a) short title, b) a size (in this case 2), and c) a well-written story using the standard “As a … I want … so that …” format. So what’s wrong? Nothing! Well, almost nothing. The user story card is a great STARTING POINT, but it is not sufficient by itself.
Have you ever been in a class or training session which is so boring you felt like you might fall asleep? Or maybe you are one of the people that DID fall asleep! I know I’ve been there many times. When I started facilitating sessions on agile and Scrum I knew I couldn’t do it if the sessions would put people to sleep. I knew I had to have dynamic sessions that kept people involved and challenged them to exceed their own expectations. I put together the best sessions I knew how and I was quite successful with it (see the bottom of the sidebar at 











