Tips for Working Effectively with Distributed Team Members

In a few classes I have taught recently, we have had some interesting conversations around working on distributed agile teams.  I always recommend trying to keep your Scrum team co-located whenever possible but in today’s world, distributed teams are unavoidable.  Here are some suggestions to help keep your distributed team members more involved:
 
1.    If the [...]

Quick, great read on agile testing

This blog post by Simon Baker is excellent and does a great job describing the role of a tester on an agile team.  http://www.think-box.co.uk/blog/2008/05/testers-in-our-agile-team.html

STP Conference Day 2

The morning started off with a Keynote from Robert Sabourin called “What is so Different about Testing in Scrum.”  I wouldn’t say the title of the talk really fit the talk itself but it was a good kick-off for the day.  If you have seen him speak before, then you know he is high energy [...]

What makes a ScrumMaster a “good” ScrumMaster?

I was recently asked to help form a job description for a new ScrumMaster (SM) position in a company.  So, it got me thinking about what qualities and skills make up a good SM.  I thought back on teams I have been on that had good and some not-so-good SMs.  Most of the skills that [...]

Collaboration Explained Class – Day 2 (Last Day)

I can honestly say that I have never been so exhausted after a 2 day class/workshop.  The last 2 days were filled with so much great information that my head is spinning.  Jean and Ronica did an amazing job with this class.  I don’t want to list out too much detail around my key take-aways.  [...]

Collaboration Explained Class – Day 1

I am currently in Boulder taking the Collaboration Explained class at Rally.  We just completed day 1 of 2 and so far, this class has been just awesome!
One of my biggest pet peeves around the Certified Scrum Master class/workshop is that anyone that wants to go and sit in on a 2 day class and [...]

Mini-Waterfall Smells – How agile are you Really?

More and more companies are adopting agile development practices (or are trying to).  Instead of delivering software once a year, more companies are now able to deliver every quarter.  More projects are working from a product backlog instead of massive requirements documents.  An increased number of developers are practicing TDD.   However, achieving true agility on a [...]

“Shout-out” Shoebox – Boosting Team Morale

I mentioned this idea at the agile conference and have had several emails about it over the last week asking for the details of how this works.  So, I thought it would just be easiest to post it here.
Celebrating accomplishments is something I am pretty passionate about on teams.  On a recent project, we implemented [...]

Why is Self-organizing so hard?

I was talking with a former co-worker last night who is working on a team that is struggling to adopt Scrum.  It appears that one of their biggest road-blocks is the teams’ inability to self-organize.  As soon as the sprint planning meeting is over, the team kinda waits around for someone to tell them what [...]

“Tests” to Determine how Agile you are

I just finished reading “Making Agility Stick:  What’s Working, What’s Not” from the Cutter Consortium(http://www.cutter.com/offers/makingagilitystick.html).  It starts with an article called “On the Stickiness of Agility in Software Development” by Laurie Williams.  There were 3 “tests” from Scott Ambler to determine if a company is truly agile or not:

 Do you have an automated test suite, [...]