Blog
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Never report on story points
The whole subject of measuring performance of agile teams is a divisive one. In an ideal world we should be looking to measure the value delivered by a team, rather than collecting performance statistics. After all, our primary goal in agile is to deliver some value to the product or customer. But measuring value isn’t…
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Sprint Commitment
How often does your sprint goal or stories change in the middle of the sprint? A late-breaking requirement or bug comes in, or a manager pops up with an urgent task, and before you know it your sprint is totally overloaded. Does that sound familiar? Teams often think they’re being agile by responding to changing…
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What’s your Definition of Ready?
Have you even been to sprint planning and realised that the so-called stories are a bunch of crap? One-line JIRA tickets that the team haven’t seen before? Then you need to enforce a Definition of Ready. We can be good about tracking the progress of stories once they’ve been added to a sprint. We track…
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How are we developing junior Product Owners?
In the olden days of waterfall development, you had teams of Business Analysts that all sat together. When a junior BA joined an organisation, they had a number of colleagues sat around them that they could call upon for advice and help, and lots of time for requirements documents to be reviewed and revised before…
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Agile Lean Ireland
It was great to go along to the Agile-Lean Ireland conference yesterday at Croke Park. The event attracted over 500 delegates – over double the amount from last year – from all over Ireland and beyond, and some top-quality Irish and international speakers. It’s great to see the Agile community so engaged with sharing their…
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Agile Training
One of the exciting roles I play in my organisation is passing on some of my knowledge of agile working to new colleagues. I’ve delivered a few Agile Overview courses during the last few months, primarily for new Product Owners and Scrum Masters – but also for some of the developers and managers as well.…