When a company throws money out of the window you will not see banknotes flying. What you will see are project deliveries being delayed. The amount of work your employees could have done for a certain cost in a certain time, now inflates and delivery takes much longer. …

Are “happy” people more productive? You would be surprised to know that the problem on how to quantify happiness at work is well known and studied from decades. You can measure your “employee turnover” or attrition rate and infer happiness. You can use a more direct approach, similarly to the way…

Agility Agility is the ability to be flexible, to change, to innovate, and to give up beloved programs and goals. Agility is also the willingness to change direction quickly when new conditions demands so, it is a survival necessity, essential given the uncertain circumstances and speed of change of today’s world. Agile …

Scrum, as originally outlined in the Scrum Guide, is designed for a single team to be able to work at its optimal capacity while maintaining a sustainable pace. …

How the Scrum framework fit in the and CMMI? Projects combining Agile mindset, practices and methods with Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) are more successful in producing higher quality software compared to project in non Agile organisations that implement CMMI only. Systematic Software Engineering works at CMMI level 5 and…

In a previous post (Ways of eating, working, evolving in a bitesize) I wrote that “The way we sustain ourselves is a lean-agile iterative short-cycled feedback loop of ingesting, digesting, and removing waste.” Expanding on the same topic a few thoughts arise in comparing a waterfall and an agile lifestyle…

In this article I will focus on Quality Assurance in Scrum Applied to Safety Critical Software. Traditionally, safety-critical projects have been developed using the waterfall process. However, this makes it costly and challenging to incrementally introduce new features and to certify the modified product for use. One of the many…

Spikes are a type of exploration Enabler Story in Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). Defined initially in Extreme Programming (XP), they are used to gain the knowledge necessary to reduce the risk of a technical approach, better understand a requirement, or increase the reliability of a story estimate. A spike has…

In Scrum the Product Owner is responsible for the Product Backlog management. Here is a quick guide on the different product backlog items, their properties, who should create them and for what purposes. Whilst the terminology may seem Jira-oriented, the same concepts are valid with any product backlog management tools. …