I have a place for the public class next week. Wahoo. Pls contact me directly if you’d like me to work with your team on Wednesday next week! Also… Cartoons restarting SOON.

Hi all. This week I am doing a quick hop from Richmond to Seattle. I am headed to San Diego next week and I need a place to host a class on Monday and Tuesday. If u have a room available please contact me directly offline from here asap. [...]

When Alistair Cockburn says something like:

"There is no such thing as "agile specification".
The phrase is a hoax."

This is exactly the kind of discussion we had at the Agile Manifesto meeting in 2001. It means there is something really interesting to talk about.

At PatientKeeper we have "Agile Specifications" in order to solve a problem. Maybe Alistair can come up with a better name.

Problem: You will implement over a thousand user stories over many years at random times. Very tight precision is required for screen shots, flow, and business logic as a error could kill a patient. Or a physician could call it "crap" and refuse to use it.

Forces: Physician users require an exact fit to their workflow, their inferencing from clinical data, in minimal time while standing in front of a sick patient using their iPhone for all clinical data. Developers have no idea exactly how this should look to a physician. Neither does the Product Owner, even though the Product Owner may be a physician. A carefully selected group of phy[...]

Scrum was originally designed to support emerging object technology environments, which have now become the dominant paradigm in software development. One of the goals was to get the organization of the team to reflect the potential flexibility of the software since software rigidity always reflects the organization that built it. This is Conway's Law. Fred Brooks cited Mel Conway's 1968 Datamation paper in The Mythical Man-Month and the name stuck. "Any organ[...]

Hi, Hopefully some people have noticed the new tag line for the site at implementingscrum.com, which is: “Starting Tough Conversations about Software Development.” I have received emails asking me to tone it down. If anything, I wish I could turn it up a little more. Really? Why? I have to start speaking up for the various Scrum Roles out there since sometimes [...]

… the world as we know it was turned upside down and inside out? At least the world as we know it here? Because the world as we know it “outside” of our little Scrum world is going to change drastically this week. Interested? Stick with me. Had some AWESOME conversations over the weekend that may cause a bit of [...]

Good evening from Phoenix, Arizona. The temperature this evening is down to a cool 98 degrees (it was up over 110 today).  Either way you look at it hot = hot.  But I do love this town.  Wow.  What great people.  And great Pigs. Or Hogs. See.  I walked down my hall this morning to get to my [...]