Recent Comments by James

On Scrum’s Neat, But I Have a Schedule to Meet

I was in a really small organization prior to where i'm at now and our biggest problem is that the team itself would say "we need to do this", management would say "yes, that's a great idea" then the next day we'd have no time to do the things we ...

On Production Support and Scrum

This sounds just like the discussion we had. We ended up taking route #1 because our product owner couldn't handle prioritizing production issues... they always stayed at the bottom. Definitely a bandaid, but it seems to be working sortof decently...

On The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Scrum

This sortof jives with Crystal methodologies Jam session turning out an idea of a tune, and then the band going off and expanding on the tune based on the jam.

On Am I, or Am I Not, Using Scrum? That is the Question.

Scrum is a very rigid and un-bending beast. Some organizations do not have the intestinal fortitude to take on the idea of scrum "All In" because of what it puts out in front of people. We frankly are doing a middle-down then bottom-up approach......

On Implementing Scrum: 8 Questions to Answer Before You Begin

David: Scrum is more than just the iterative and incremental frameworks. It's about self management and lean/flow based process improvement. As it relates to waterfall, it's basically like a waterfall every day :) analyze a little in the morning,...

On What is Definition of Done (DoD)?

One thing we struggle with in our organization is the popular belief that nothing is ever 'done' so the word itself is what people get hung up on. I'm still trying to find a verbage that communicates the Definition of Done's purpose to our organiz...

On A Cure for Task Estimation Obsession

Our teams don't estimate tasks during sprint planning... however we do ask the team to go input every task they can think of with an estimate after the sprint planning meeting and every day of the sprint going forward. Sometimes this means our 2nd...

On Am I, or Am I Not, Using Scrum? That is the Question.

Christophe, good point. Scrum is a process control framework. Just by introducing it as a bar to measure your progress by it's doing it's job! :)

On The Sprint Review: Mastering the Art of Feedback

Thanks for this article. It puts into words what I've experienced when we do sprint reviews. You always learn something at them... and scope creep is such a negative connotation for something that is inevitable and we should always accept in agili...

On Those devilish actuals

Sorry but this is going to sound rude but I really am curious. Why do you need to know task actuals? Why wouldn't you just track hours to deliverables? you know... backlog items... user stories.... use cases... requirements.. name it whatever y...

On Those devilish actuals

or just derive hours on total sprint committed hours divided by velocity times story points for a given user story?

On Beware of the Evil “85% Done”

I had a very similiar experience at a previous employer and also recently with a database upgrade project. Being 90% done with 'all of it' numerous times. "just one more small thing to finish". My first case was a project that was '9 months beh...

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