What Kind of Manager are You?

Over the years people have identified some styles of management with cute names. Most of the cute names are for obviously bad styles, but not all. Anyway, since I’ve learned a new one recently I thought it miht be fun to review. So I did, and by golly! I found a bunch of different styles […]

Metrics for Your Scrum Team

I have spent the past couple of years as the owner of some scrum teams and when I integrate that experience with years of doing, teaching, and coaching scrum I find that I have finally found some good ways to use metrics. This article is for all of you managers and scrum masters out there […]

It’s Agile’s Fault

Last night I launched FourSquare for the first time in several weeks so I could check in from Dubai International Airport, which is another story entirely. No big surprise, FourSquare has been upgraded since I last used the app. Guess what, though? The new version sucks. I hate it. I intend to uninstall it and […]

A Fresh Look at Compensation – Pt. I

Principles of a Compensation System I feel like it’s time to tag up again on the subject of compensation for developers. Compensation comes up as a topic when people are transitioning to scrum, and for a good reason. People are compensated as individuals, but in scrum we begin to understand the role of the team […]

New Information

I mentioned in my last post about the Indian shower design thing where they tend to leak all over the bathroom floor. Well, on my way to Shanghai yesterday I was sitting next to a Swiss guy who happens to be living in France but is moving back to St. Louis next week. Yuh…huh. Anyway, […]

Spending two weeks doing CSM courses in India. Here are a few mostly non-agile non-scrum non-professional notes: Two 9 hour flights in a row is still long. On the way into Delhi, they announced that they had to fumigate the airplane before landing! A moment later you could smell the perfumed insecticide. Turns out it […]

Developer Owns a Story – Good Idea or Bad?

One aspect of the transition to Agile is the switch to truly team-based work. Like all aspects of significant change, it can be difficult to get it to take hold. One of the anti-patterns that coaches see from time to time is when a single developer takes over the development of a user story and […]