Last week at the ALM Summit, Microsoft colleague Jonathan Wanagel and I presented a talk titled Technical Interviewing Youre Doing it Wrong! and it was one of many highlights of the event. Download the slides here.

We identified eight...

I am pleased to announced I have been nominated to the Scrum Alliance Board of Directors again. This is a three year term, spanning 2013 through 2015.

I am a long way from the position. Today I submitted my summary position statement, listed...

Ive been getting a lot of requests lately of people asking for guidance for effective communication techniques when working in or with distributed agile/Scrum teams. I outline some approaches in my book, The Scrum Field Guide, but it is not all...

Youve just finished a great story-writing workshop with your stakeholders. Youre excited about the new product and are anxious to get started. Until, that is, you get back to your office and look at the mountain of stories that youve somehow got...

I often see Scrum teams struggle with the retrospective. Retrospectives are not easy. They take time, they take commitment, and they take courage. When the pressures on, theyre often the first thing to go. In the rush to deliver a product, having...

Even with all the good reasons to do retrospectives, they are still the first thing most teams cut when they’re feeling pressured to perform faster, deliver more, or increase quality. What’s ironic is that they are cutting the one thing that could help them both increase their velocity and quality.

Lets say you are on a team that is both newly formed and new to practicing agile. Your daily standup meetings appear to be going well and you are looking forward to your teams first demo. The big day comes, you get in front of the customer, and...

Data tells us that the best team sizes are between five and nine people, all of whom are fully dedicated to a project for the duration of the project, and who work together in a cross-functional way to deliver working software at the end of every...

There is no one-size-fits-all, magic bullet for determining a sprint length that works well for every team. Originally, Scrum called for one-month sprints, but nowadays many teams have been successful with two-week or even one-week sprints.

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The most frequently asked question on any project might be, “When will you be done?” or “Will you have it all done by a certain date?” We all have experienced times when our projections have been way off and we’ve suffered as a result. Scrum promises a more adaptable planning scenario, one that allows for and indeed expects change. But does that promise mean that we don’t have toor can’tdo release planning any more?

The simple answer is no.