Fail Early, Learn Often

While moderating a panel discussion recently, one of the first questions after the introductions was asking to explain what was meant by allowing a team to fail. The important understanding that I think was misunderstood is that failure is not meant to allow releases or products fail, but to generate learning opportunities to ensure ultimate [...]

Measuring Outputs Expanded

I talked at a high level in my Measure Outputs post about the types of measures that are useful. That post stated broadly that input measures do little to help improve, control or predict performance. In this post, I will expand on that concept to cover in more depth what types of measures focus on [...]

Why Sign on the Dotted Line

Consulting organizations often require signoff on deliverables to ensure that the client acknowledges that contractual obligations are met. Across organizational lines, these signatures, serve mostly a legal purpose. I often wondered about the use of signoff on deliverables inside of an organization where there is no external relationship. I’ve seen some development shops average as [...]

Cataloging Scrum Problems to Avoid

At the risk of becoming overly link heavy in recent posts, I want to highlight two sources for trouble-shooting scrum implementations.  The first is from Mike Griffiths’ Introducing Agile methods to Organizations: Mistakes to Avoid” (part 1, part 2, part 3). These meaty articles share plenty of wisdom.
The second is from the ScrumAlliance. They have [...]

Cycle Time as a Primary Measure

Mishkin Berteig has a great post up at his blog titled Measuring Process Improvements - Cycle Time. In it, he eloquently details why development teams should care about and manage cycle time. It complements nicely my First Law of Development and I encourage giving it a deep read.

Tips for Distributed Teams

Megan Sumrell has 10 nice tips up on working with remote teams. I like that these tips include a softer side to the remote challenge. To them, I add a few fundamentals:

Keep an open IM channel. One to one is great, but a team chat room is even better. Create a room that the team [...]

BA World Symposium Conference

BusinessAnalystWorld Symposium put on a great conference in Denver. Slides to my presentation Agile Thoughts – Exploring the Philosophy and Mechanics that Make Agile Work can be downloaded from this post.

People Laws (part 2)

This post continues the Laws of Development Physics as related to people elements that impact development.

People Laws (part 1)

“…when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in thought advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.”
                                                                                                                  - Lord Kelvin

“There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains [...]

Pay Now or Pay Later

To follow up on the fourth law, I add as reinforcement the fifth law of development physics: 
If you cannot pay for variability reduction, you will pay in one or more of the following ways:

Long iteration times and high story points in progress

Wasted capacity or need for more resources

Slower burn down rates

Of course, the [...]