http://thedailystandup.com Practical advice for stress free agile project management. Mon, 27 Jul 2009 00:21:49 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Decision Time, or is it? At the last Lean Software Meetup, Jeffrey Fredrick quoted a line in David Allen's book Getting Things Done book that stuck in my mind: "Decisions not made cause stress." As someone who has been on and off the GTD wagon for the last ... http://thedailystandup.com/2009/07/26/last-responsible-moment-vs-gtd-unmade-decisions-cause-stress/ Esther Derby tweeted a great question that stuck in my noodle the last week: estherderby: skimming Good to Great. some profiled companies ain't so great anymore. Since Good to Great provided great inspiration for me, this caused me some consternation. Circuit City, Fannie Mae, and Wells Fargo aren't doing so ... http://thedailystandup.com/2009/06/25/good-to-great-now-not-so-great/ [caption id="attachment_81" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="ScrumMaster actioning impediments directly after the daily standup."] [/caption] Here is a very clear blog article by Chris Sterling outlining the rationale behind capturing and assigning actions for impediments at the daily standup. He explains the connection to the continual improvement philosophy of Kaizen. Spot-on, Chris. We've ... http://thedailystandup.com/2009/05/16/action-your-impediments-daily-for-continual-improvement/ "The Key role of middle management is reinvention." Tom DeMarco Often I hear of Agile Adoption best occurring top down. Salesforce.com did that, from zero to Agile overnight. Other times I hear about bottom up Agile , or Agile in "Stealth Mode". for a development team is tired of death-marches, a ... http://thedailystandup.com/2009/02/26/leading-from-the-middle/ This is a great post that uses the familiar metaphor of the gym and physical fitness to apply to adopting Agile. I've seen the pattern described here too often. Developers start out the first three sprints and produce production ready software every iteration. It seems like everything is going well. Then ... http://thedailystandup.com/2009/02/15/hitting-the-wall-with-agile-your-adoption-try-adding-technical-practices/ I wrote this post about sailing "inside" vs "outside" the boat. I learned much from participating as a crew member on a sailing team. It positively influenced my work with software teams, as I'm sure any team sport would. http://thedailystandup.com/2009/02/10/the-connection-between-sailing-and-software/ A group of folks interested in using agile values and principles to give back to the community is going to meet in January to charter the Bay Area Agile Philanthropy User Group (BAAPUG). This will be on January 17 at Tacit Knowledge headquarters and we will define the community, the ... http://thedailystandup.com/2008/12/29/bay-area-agile-philanthropy-group/ If you are struggling with concrete enough acceptance criteria, acceptance criteria that doesn't specify the "how", just the "what", one technique that I find especially helpful is specifying "How will we demo?" to the story. This usually puts the product owner and the team in the right frame of mind ... http://thedailystandup.com/2008/12/29/how-will-we-demo/ I like 3M post-it notes for sprint and release planning. It makes it really easy to have multiple people interact with stories and tasks. Unlike electronic tools, I don't become a bottleneck for planning. However, I'm not against electronic tools.  In fact they make sense for distributed teams and for ... http://thedailystandup.com/2008/12/08/3m-restickable-glue-stick-is-my-friend/ I attended a special meeting of the Bay area APLN chapter. David Anderson gave a talk on his recipe for success with Agile. Here are the notes. It was a good talk. I especially liked his description of how he pulled his development teams in to an all hands meeting ... http://thedailystandup.com/2008/11/05/david-anderson-speaks-at-bay-area-apln/