Coming out of the closet – the life and adventure of a traditional project manager turned Agilist

I’m coming out of the closet today. No, not that closet. Another closet, the tabu closet in the Agile community. Yes, I was (and to a point still am) a control freak, traditional, command and control project manager. Yes, that’s right you read it correctly. Here’s why this is important: in 2003 when I first …

The most valuable question for your software project

Every time a software project is started, a dance starts: the dance of project approval. Decision makers and project delivery team take different positions at a table, some ask questions, others do their best to respond, given that these questions are typically about the future. Some of the questions are so much into the future …

The three main trends in long agile adoption processes

I was having a discussion with fellow agile adopters yesterday and a bunch of interesting patterns emerged from the discussion: We are getting to agile/process improvement fatigue The management of software development is changing, but agile adoption processes do not have a mandate to change the management approach We don’t have a process to learn …

Nokia goes agile. Will the rest follow?

Ari Jaaksi from maemo.org is blogging about Scrum in Nokia’s Linux/Open source projects.Also, Juha-Markus Aalto (of Object development fame) presented what I would call the “Nokia Agile Requirements Model” (and what Dean Leffingwell calls “Lean, Scalable Requirements Model“) at the Object days in Tampere. See the slides here(PDF alert). With all of this I can …

End the never ending design discussions: Timeboxed estimation for User Stories, a pattern in Agile adoption

In this post, Jason explains one common problem with the estimation and planning sessions in Agile teams. The problem he describes however, is quite common and has lead to implementation of the Separate Design and Requirements anti-pattern in the traditional software development world.So I thought I’d write a pattern about a simple and common solution …

The Proxy Product Owner, a pattern in Scrum adoption: version 1

Below I try to describe a pattern that I’ve faced and have seen in other teams in the context of an Agile transition.See the explanation section for more details on each of the sections in the pattern.If you have faced similar situations let us know of your own story in the comments below. Proxy Product …