Scrum Alliance -Profile: Mike Cohn

Mike is a founding member of the Scrum Alliance, Inc. and currently serves as secretary on the Board of Directors. He founded and operates Mountain Goat Software, a process and project management consultancy and training firm.

Mike has over twenty years of experience in a variety of environments and specializes in helping companies adopt and improve their use of agile processes and techniques in order to build extremely high performance development organizations. He has previously served as a technology executive in organizations of various sizes, from start ups to Fortune 40 companies. Mike ran his first Scrum project in 1995 and has been a vocal proponent of Scrum ever since. He has helped with the adoption of such processes at numerous companies, including Bioware, Capital One, Electronic Arts, Google, High Moon Studios, Intuit, JDA Software, Lexis Nexis, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Nielsen Media Research, Pearson, Phillips Electronics, Sabre, Siemens, Sun Microsystems, Texas Instruments, Turner Broadcasting, Ultimate Software, and Yahoo.

Mike is a frequent featured conference speaker at industry events and a recognized magazine contributor. He has authored numerous books, including Agile Estimating and Planning and User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development, as well as several books on Java and C++ database programming. In addition to his service with the Scrum Alliance, Inc., Mike was also a founding member of the Agile Alliance and is a member of IEEE Computer Society and the ACM. Mike is a Scrum Alliance Certified Scrum Trainer.

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Upcoming Courses by Mike

Course Title	Date Range	City
Effective User Stories for Agile Requirements	3 Aug 2009	Boulder
Certified ScrumMaster	4-5 Aug 2009	Boulder
Agile Estimating and Planning	6 Aug 2009	Boulder
Certified Scrum Product Owner	7-8 Sep 2009	London
Effective User Stories for Agile Requirements	9 Sep 2009	London
Certified ScrumMaster	10-11 Sep 2009	London
Certified ScrumMaster	14-15 Sep 2009	La Jolla
Certified Scrum Product Owner	16-17 Sep 2009	La Jolla
Certified ScrumMaster	12-14 Oct 2009	Oslo
Certified Scrum Product Owner	15-16 Oct 2009	Oslo
Effective User Stories for Agile Requirements	30 Nov 2009	London
Certified ScrumMaster	1-2 Dec 2009	London
Agile Estimating and Planning	3 Dec 2009	London
Certified ScrumMaster	18-20 Jan 2010	Oslo
Certified Scrum Product Owner	21-22 Jan 2010	Oslo

Recent Articles by Mike

Writing the Product Backlog Just Enough and Just In Time 12 Feb 08: How much work should you do in advance of a sprint? Nothing? As little as possible? As much as possible? Find out why doing just enough, just in time might be your best strategy.
Advice on Conducting the Scrum of Scrums Meeting 07 May 07: When scaling Scrum to large projects, the scrum of scrums meeting can be a vital tool for keeping your teams in sync and out of each other's way. Mike Cohn gives some pointers on how to run and coordinate these important Scrum meetings.
Leader of the Band: Six Attributes of a Good ScrumMaster 05 Feb 07: When it comes time to choose a ScrumMaster, who should you choose? A technical guru? A political mastermind? A visionary? In this week’s column, Mike Cohn describes six attributes to look for in a potential ScrumMaster.

Resources by Mike

Scrum Smells: An Initial Catalog: by Mike Cohn This article was written for the Scrum Alliance soapbox. It presents an initial collection of Scrum smells or indicators that things may be amiss on a Scrum project.
Introduction to Scrum Methodology: This is a 60-90 minute introduction to Scrum that is fully redistributable and reusable. Use it to introduce Scrum to your user group or organization. Provided as a PowerPoint file so you can customize. Please acknowledge the source but please use...
Prioritizing Product Backlog_Cohn: Fall 2007 Scrum Gathering: London Wednesday, 14 November, 10.45-12.15 “Prioritizing Your Product Backlog” Presenter: Mike Cohn, CST, Mountain Goat Software, USA The biggest risk to most projects is building the wr...
Guide to Transitioning_Cohn: Fall 2007 Scrum Gathering: London Wednesday, 14 November, 15.30-17.00 “Succeeding with Agile: A Guide to Transitioning” Presenter: Mike Cohn, CST, Mountain Goat Software, USA Transitioning to an agile development proces...
User Stories
Prioritizing Your Backlog
Leading an SOT Team: Presented by Mike Cohn at the 2009 Orlando Scrum Gathering

Recent Comments by Mike

On Language for Discussing Releases: There are some great ideas in here, Dan. Thanks for sharing them with us. You are very right that it is hard to give a project stakeholder a message like "We'll be late." We should probably all practice saying that 100 times in the mirror each mor...
On Advice on Conducting the Scrum of Scrums Meeting: Hi Matt--I'm not sure if I understand what you mean about the Scrum of Scrum being used for individual team planning to ensure requirements and roadblocks are addressed. A lone team on a desert island wouldn't have a need for a Scrum of Scrums mee...
On Advice on Conducting the Scrum of Scrums Meeting: Replying to the two previous comments: First, if two different participants disagree they need to work it out with the help of other participants. This is part of becoming a self-organizing team. Second, Yes, the Scrum of Scrum participants will...
On Advice on Conducting the Scrum of Scrums Meeting: Thanks, anonymous. Your constrained-but-leave-time-after approach is essentially what I do. We try to get a quick update from everyone, go over some basic sharing and then dive into specific issues to be resolved. Some people will opt out if they ...
On Leader of the Band: Since a ScrumMaster is a part of the team, he or she is held accountable for the success of the project but only to the extent that every team member is. The ScrumMaster should not be singled out for any special recognition or blame in the event o...
On Perfect Planning: Guy--Nice article. It should be pointed out, though, that the Kanban approach of Anderson and Garber was used for sustaining engineering (aka "maintenance") efforts. I've worked with many teams who plan sprints in the typical agile manner but also...
On Scrum Alliance Certifications: Hi Plamen--There is indeed a Certified Scrum Product Owner. A couple of sessions are scheduled for Europe over the next few months. In fact, there's more in Europe than in the US between now and the end of the year. Within the next month or two th...
On Case Study: October 2007: One of the things I like to suggest when a team has to drop items from a sprint is that they plan sufficiently fewer hours in the next sprint so that they are nearly certain to be able to finish the work of that sprint without dropping work. I don...
On Writing the Product Backlog Just Enough and Just In Time: Hi Haim- I'm glad you found this article helpful. I have teams estimate with the sequence of values 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40 and 100 (story points or ideal days). I ask them to think of those numbers as buckets. A 13-liter bucket cannot hold a 1...
On Writing the Product Backlog Just Enough and Just In Time: Hi Geir--It sounds like you've discovered some great subtle ways to improve things for your team. That's fantastic.
On Writing the Product Backlog Just Enough and Just In Time: Hi Mike--It is amazing how even a little bit of visibility (e.g., upcoming cards posted to a nearby wall) can really help the team.
On Writing the Product Backlog Just Enough and Just In Time: Hi Cindy-- I don't exactly follow what you do. From the above it sounds to me that you are doing something similar to what I advise, which is (a) writing product backlog items at different levels of detail based on things such as priority, risk, ...
On Scrum Shouldn't Be a Burden: Hi James-- You are absolutely correct. I've been working on a new book and in it I describe five steps or phases that I've noticed occur in successful transitions. The final phase is what I call "Transfer." It refers to the need to transfer the...
On Writing the Product Backlog Just Enough and Just In Time: Hi Anthony-- Usually when a team puts a "?" as the estimate on a story it means they don't know enough about it at the time to estimate it. The solution is usually to get more information from the PO about what to build or to develop more technica...
On Writing the Product Backlog Just Enough and Just In Time: Hi Rachel--I'm glad you liked the article. Yes, for most teams I work with a 13-point user story is achievable within a two-week sprint. That's on the upper end of what most teams can do in a sprint. I often ask product owners to spend some time a...
On Writing the Product Backlog Just Enough and Just In Time: Hi Jay--You are absolutely right. I find that the exact same advice I give to User Experience Designers is what I say to architects: "Just in time, just enough." Some things need to be thought through more than others so do so when there will be v...
On Writing the Product Backlog Just Enough and Just In Time: Hi Andrea--Thanks for sharing this description of your approach. This sounds very interesting.
On Writing the Product Backlog Just Enough and Just In Time: Hi Andrea--I can't take credit for inventing any of those ideas. User Stories come from XP and its inventors, Kent Beck, Ron Jeffries and Ward Cunningham. The term "Planning Poker" was originally from James Grenning. And I think Relative Estimatin...

Upcoming Courses by Mike

Recent Articles by Mike

Resources by Mike

Recent Comments by Mike

At a Glance

Mike Cohn