Agile

Sometimes, teams have trouble releasing their work, showing the value of the work they’ve completed. There are many possible reasons for this release problem: The team doesn’t have sufficient working agreements about what “done” means. I’ve written about frictionless releasing. In Create Your Successful Agile Project, I wrote about the done, done-done, and done-done-done words we sometimes hear. The team works ...

Product owners can take on too many responsibilities, become too tactical and inward-focused, and lose sight of their main job: maximising the value a product creates. Instead of managing the team or establishing the right process, product owner should manage the product and exercise product leadership, as I explain in this article. Three Types of Leadership Scrum is a simple ...

Surprisingly I’ve never blogged about the Strategic Product Owner / Tactical Product Owner model, this is surprising because it is a model I both find again and again and advocate again and again. I find lots of companies who have a version of this model in place, they have created the model to deal with their own situation. But few ...

I just read a refreshing point of view on a subject I love, from one of my testing heroes, Janet Gregory. Before proceeding, please take your time to read her point of view. I use it I have been using the Shift Left and even Shift Right terminology, as we say in Dublin, for donkeys years. I am not sure ...

Agile transformations are tough. That’s because wherever you start, the agile transformation creates culture clashes. Often, teams start with agile approaches. Teams discover the agile approach and practices that work for that team. Then, as the team gains experience, they refine their approach and practices. That’s the external part of what we see in an agile transformation.     However, ...

For years I have been using this picture to describe the Product Owner role. For years I have been saying: “The title Product Owner is really an alias. Nobody should have Product Owner on their business cards. Product Owner is a Scrum defined role which is usually filled by a Product Manager or Business Analyst, sometimes it is filled by ...

Agile companies believe that teamwork is essential to delivering working software, and that great Agile teams are about “we” rather than “I.” Unfortunately, many companies claim they have an Agile team, but in reality they don’t. It’s important to learn what an Agile team really is, and to find ways to build them within your own company. It takes a ...

One of the hardest part when it comes to implement new ideas and features through the lifecycle of a project is making sure that the specific feature or the new framework that will be added, will play an essential part in the project’s success. By implementing features that are hard to implement and are not as essential to the customer, ...

Last time I set out some of the things a Product Owner should be doing – or at least considering doing. Even a quick look at that list will tell you the Product Owner is going to be a busy person. So in this post I’d like to suggest some thinigs Product Owners should NOT be doing. Product Owners Cutting code should ...