The Agilist

Tools cannot measure technical debt

The thing is, as a developer, if you don’t know how much technical debt you have, a tool isn’t going to help you. You need to understand your code base, and then you need to understand what it needs to look like, and this comes from experience and from understanding…

Business Analysts != Product Owners

Business Analysts are often thrust into the Product Owner (PO) role in scrum because they seem to be the closest thing that exists in the pre-agile world. As PO’s, the former BA has a new set of responsibilities, and requires new authority to deliver on those.

Enterprise agility

I question whether many large organisations are capable of becoming agile, even in the presence of an existential threat.

Large organisations with a culture that puts preservation of the status quo implicitly at the top of it’s ideology are the last ones to notice an…

Microsoft is agile

This may come as a surprise, but Microsoft’s 4000 strong developer division (the guys who develop Visual Studio, TFS and other developer tools) has made the transformation to scrum successfully, in the absence of any existential threat.

Refactoring across domains

Rapid, constant refactoring within a domain is possible and desirable, but I suspect you’d want to be much slower and more deliberate about refactoring across domain boundaries, that is, changing the contracts/API’s between domains, and I’m really talking about domains that are…

Zero defects

Developing a culture of zero defects all the time is an essential attribute of high performing agile teams. This is closely linked to the concept of “building quality in” at the source, which means never letting work with defects move downstream — detect and correct at the source (unit tests, integration…

20th century management

20th century management came up with this notion of people as “resources”. Under this style of management people might belong to some paper “team”, but the team was always a weak entity — in reality managers and projects competed over resources, pulling people from one project to…

How to start agile

The first step towards agile can be the hardest — we can end up overwhelmed by the various frameworks, methodologies, practices, and conflicting advice.

But starting is actually very easy.

1. Set up a cross-functional team. The team must include…

Potentially shippable is a cop out

Scrum has this notion of “potentially shippable product increment”. The output of every sprint is supposed to be potentially shippable product. This is a good thing — it gets new agile teams away from silly practices like developing in one sprint and testing in the…