Many people ask me about team spaces and how to set them up. Not long ago, colleagues Ade Miller and Ajoy Krishnamoorthy did a walkthrough of the Microsoft patterns & practices space - it is built around agile teams. When watching this video,...

Thanks to everyone who attended my workshop at SQE Agile Development Practices 2009 in Orlando titled “Practicing ScrumBut: Ensuring Project Failure” and special thanks to Cory Foy for coming up from Tampa to do the workshop with me.

I am always amazed when I ask people what they think the job of a manager is. I get answers like “to tell people what to do” to “stay out of the way” to “do my performance review” to “lead”.

The last one is always of interest to me. Do companies hire managers or do they hire leaders?

Agile is about collaboration and cross functionality.  There are no heros on Agile teams.  How, then, do the hero's in your company fit in an Agile team or project?  Putting them full time on the project may impact other projects because the expertise is taken offline.  Further, it may cause the persons morale to dip and leave your company, going to a competitor.  That is bad.  What about when we find that we need a SME (or hero) on your project, but only in a limited or short term capacity?  How do you structure your team?

This is an old interview question I used to give people at Microsoft. Think you can figure it out?

Mixing Scrum and Waterfall will provide you an interesting mix...  This is one of my older MSDN posts from August, 2006.  Enjoy. :)

One of the things I love about XP (this is a principle of Scrum also) is the concept of Sustainable Pace. Ron Jeffries aptly documents this on his site in the following text:

Growing up, I had a dream of being a photographer. I didn’t know why I was drawn to it, but it was something I wanted to do. I bought my first camera when I was 10 years old – it was a Kodak Disc camera. My second camera was a Konica TC Autoreflex – it was my first real camera. I worked a summer for my dad at the wonderful rate of $2.50 per hour – I thought it was good for 11 years old. As I got older, I became more into photography.

Two weeks ago I had the opportunity to take a class from Luke Hohmann , CEO of Enthiosys , based on his book called Innovation Games ®. I was a bit skeptical at first because I had read some of Luke’s writing (and Rich Mironov's) about the Product Owner role in Scrum and I did not agree with it. I had the fear that there would be some Scrum bashing going into this workshop.

Boy was I wrong.