Here’s a Chinese translation of my book Scrum and XP from the Trenches. Thanks Jacky Li! A Spanish and Japanese version of the book is also available. Korean, Portuguese, German, French, and Slovak translations are underway. I’m impressed by the agile community! All translations will soon be listed on InfoQ. Feel free to email me
Continue readingFixed priced contracts – flawed by design
When talking about Scrum to business people I very often get the question "How do I deal with fixed priced contracts when doing Scrum?"
It struck me today no one who ever asked me this, has come to the conclusion that doing fixed priced contracts could be wrong way to go altogether.
And that is a bit scary.
Continue readingSpanish version of Scrum and XP from the Trenches
Here’s a draft version of the Spanish translation of my book Scrum and XP from the Trenches. Good work Ángel Medinilla! Chinese, Korean, German, and Japanese translations are underway, I’ll let you know when they are done. UPDATE (June 10): Within 1 day of publishing this blog entry I received an offer to translate the
Continue readingTop 3 Tools your Scrum team can’t live without
Here are top three tools for any Scrum project
1. | Google Spreadsheets | Your backlog, anywhere & anytime. A perfect lean alternative to your Scrum board on the wall. Anywhere & anytime. | |
2. | Confluence Wiki | Atlassian Confluence, wiki as simple as it gets. Any user can get going in this user friendly tool. | |
3. | Trillian chat | Hooks up with MSN, ICQ and Yahoo. Hold live discussions going across sites. Just waiting for that Skype plugin.. |
10 ways to screw up with Scrum and XP
Here are the slides from my session "10 ways to screw up with Scrum and XP", from the JavaForum conference in Malmö. I’ve done this session at other conferences, but updated the slides a little bit each time. Interesting that so many people like to hear about how to get it all wrong :o)
Continue readingPlanning ahead in Scrum
In Scrum it is often perceived that planning takes place on sprint planning day. Getting the required parties in the same place and do planning is a good way of making real time decisions. But getting people together is a dounting or impossible task and this also neglects some of the thought processes that needs to take place before stories are estimatable.
Continue readingAgile version control with multiple teams
Here’s a paper describing a strategy for version control with multiple teams in an agile environment. It is hosted on InfoQ. Enjoy! Online version (best for reading read on screen) PDF version (best for printing) Single-page summary in print-friendly format.
Continue readingDealing with technical debt
Because of unclear definition of benefit of removing technical debt, PO and teams risk move into a standstill regarding activities to to remove it. This is counter productive, we should remove thresholds of quality improvement activities, not introduce them. So let’s look into a simple definition that can help out.
Continue readingBest speaker award again :o)
Cool, I won another best speaker award :o) This time at the JFokus conference in Stockholm.
Continue readingScrum in the large – demystify roadmaps and progress tracking
As a Scrum team, we need to recognise that we are not alone in building business value for our software and provide visibility in where we are heading. By using a roadmap updated per sprint basis is an easy way of making everyone pull in the same direction.
Continue readingHow to catch up on test automation
Many companies with existing legacy code bases bump into a huge impediment when they want to get agile: lack of test automation.
This article illustrates how to address this problem by creating a test automation backlog and implementing a few tests each sprint.
Test case | Risk |
Manual test cost (man-hours) |
Automation cost (story points) |
Block account | high | 5 hrs | 0.5 sp |
Validate transfer | high | 3 hrs | 5 sp |
See transaction history | medium | 3 hrs | 1 sp |
Sort query results | medium | 2 hrs | 8 sp |
Deposit cash | high | 1.5 hr | 1 sp |
Security alert | high | 1 hr | 13 sp |
Add new user | low | 0.5 hr | 3 sp |
Change skin | low | 0.5 hr | 20 sp |
Scrum success stories
As I mentioned in Failing with Scrum, Scrum is no silver bullet. It doesn’t guarantee success, but it improves the odds.
Over the past few years I’ve been involved in dozens of Scrum projects, directly or indirectly. Interestingly enough, every single case that I can remember has been successful (maybe I just have selective memory…)! The client has been happy with the process and wants to continue using Scrum in future projects.
Here are some thoughts and conclusions about that.
Continue readingFailing with Scrum
There are plenty of Scrum success stories out there, but not so many failure stories. That gives rise to a healthy scepticism. Where are the failure stories? Obviously there must be failures! Or?
Here’s a "failure" story and some thoughts on what it means to fail with Scrum.
Continue readingIndex card generator – version 2!
Many people use a spreadsheet to house their Scrum Product Backlog. That works quite fine. However, during sprint planning meetings it is usually much more effective to use physical index cards. See my book Scrum and XP from the Trenches for the reasoning behind this. Here’s a simple tool that generates printable index cards in
Continue readingScrum and XP from the Trenches – now on Amazon
Scrum and XP from the Trenches is now listed on Amazon.com. (as well as on InfoQ). If you liked the book then go submit a review on Amazon :o)
Continue readingBest Speaker award :o)
Cool, I was awarded Best Speaker at the Bits & Chips conference in The Netherlands :o) Never would have expected that, considering there were more than 50 other speakers! I did a brief talk about "Bootstrapping Scrum and XP", with an audience of about 150 people. Decided to open with 15 minutes of "The fastest
Continue readingAgile toolkit
An agile coach should never leave home without his Agile Toolkit! Mine is much sloppier. The pretty one above belongs to my co-coach David Barnholdt.
Continue readingAgile Afternoon
For those of you who were at the Crisp Agile Afternoon, the slides are now available here.
Continue readingScrum and XP fit together
Most people in the industry seem to agree that Scrum and XP complement each other.
2nd Annual State of Agile Development Survey shows the following statistics for Scrum & XP adoption:
- Scrum: 37%
- Scrum + XP: 23%
- XP: 12%
JAOO tutorial slides
For those of you who attended my Scrum & XP tutorial at the JAOO conference, here are the slides: http://www.crisp.se/henrik.kniberg/presentations/JAOO-2007-Henrik-Kniberg.pdf Thanks for attending, hope you had a good time! Despite my piano playing (how can I resist a grand piano standing in the corner of the room :o) I thought the attendance would be like
Continue readingDetta har hänt i sommar
För er som inte knarkar tekniknyheter lika okontrollerat som jag gör har jag nöjet att få summera de senaste 5-6 veckorna inom områdena Java, Ajax, Scrum och annat av intresse. Tro mig, jag har gallrat stenhårt. JUnit 4.4 släpptes nyligen. Nyheterna var inte speciellt upphetsande. En av mina favoritbloggare, Cederic Beust, har skrivit om dynamiska
Continue readingScrum and XP from the Trenches – printed version available on InfoQ
Scrum and XP from the Trenches is now available on InfoQ, with forwards by Mike Cohn and Jeff Sutherland :o) The printed version costs $22.95, the online version is free but requires registration on InfoQ. My older PDF version is hereby deprecated, so if you have any links please update to the InfoQ version! http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/scrum-xp-from-the-trenches
Continue readingPlanning Poker
I’ve written up a page with a pretty graphical summary of what Planning Poker is. http://www.crisp.se/planningpoker/
Continue readingManifest for the Agile Tester
I recently spoke at a conference for testers arranged by SAST (Swedish Association of Software Testers) on the topic of Agile software development. Over 150 testers turned up, breaking all previous records for that association! I’m glad to see that you testers are interested in this stuff!
Anyway, trying to figure out a good opening statement for this conference I found the following angle that I’m pretty happy with afterwards, in a smug sort of way :o)
Continue readingCrisp, Scrum och Jeff Sutherland
Även om en del Crispare var tidigt ute med Scrum, framför allt Henrik Kniberg, så var jag själv initialt skeptisk. Efter Henrik bestämde sig fyra andra Crispare (Jan Grape, Mats Strandberg, Magnus Axelqvist och Hans Brattberg) att gå certifieringskursen i Uppsala för ett år sedan. Jag tackade nej med motiveringen att "Scrum känns som en
Continue readingIndex card generator
For those of you that do Scrum, here’s a simple tool that generates printable index cards in A5 format directly from your Excel-based product backlog.
Continue readingScrum and XP from the Trenches – version 2.0
I finally found time to create version 2.0 of "Scrum and XP from the Trenches" :o) No revolutionary changes. Just wanted to clarify some chapters, add some missing info, and add some new knowledge gained since the first version. Added a chapter on planning poker. Added a chapter on how the team decides which stories
Continue readingIvar Jacobson gör en pudel!
Ivar Jacobson, Pan-Wei Ng, och Ian Spence har just publicerat en ganska lång artikel i DDJ med namnet Enough of Processes: Let’s Do Practices, Part I. Det är, förvånande nog, ett ganska ärligt erkännande att dagens processer för mjukvaruutveckling inte fungerar. In the first installment of this two-part article, we examine the issues facing the
Continue readingKen Schwaber om kodkvalitet och ett företags värde
InfoQ har sammanfattat en mycket inspirerande presentation av Ken Schwaber, en av Scrums grundare. Hans tes är att kvaliteten på ett företags applikationer är av så vitalt värde att den borde vara på agendan för företagets ledning. Om utvecklarna stressas att kompromissa med kvaliteten på den kod de tar fram, så minskar det verkliga värdet
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