One of the key concepts of Kaizen is the pursuit of operation excellence through a housekeeping technique known as the ‘five Ss’. The Kaizen Institute recommends the ‘five Ss’ are a good place for an organisation to start when introducing the concept, as it allows all employees to get involved. 5S is defined as a...

In software development, effort estimation is the process of predicting the most realistic amount of effort (expressed in terms of person-hours or money) required to develop or maintain software based on incomplete, uncertain and noisy input. Time estimation of software development tasks without statistics doesn’t work. I would also argue that the time, cost, and effort required to estimate and track time...

As a project manager, a scrum master, a team lead, or even as an agile coach I’ve wondered from time to time about the true value that I bring to a team. You see, to me it is entirely plausible that a team could work just fine without any of the aforementioned roles being present....

I think we can all agree that agile is an over(ab)used buzzword and a misinterpreted concept these days. Similar to that other popular concept, productivity. Well, inspired by some of the thought leaders in the field, I think and dare say that agility is a way of approaching work (and also life, why not?). So,...

Agile transformation, undoubtedly two words that strike fear into the heart of any product organization.  It should be an exciting time, with tough conversations, compromises, and hopefully good progress. But even if you successfully form a single team, there’s another problem… the rest of the organization has no idea how to deal with you. There...

Many teams have at least a moderate ability to plan and control their time. They’re able to say, “We will work on these things over the coming sprint,” and have a somewhat reasonable expectation of that being the case. And that’s the type of team we encounter in much of the Scrum literature–the literature that...

Yagni originally is an acronym that stands for “You Aren’t Gonna Need It”. It emerged as one of the key principles of Extreme Programming.  Put another way, the principle states: “Always implement things when you actually need them, never when you just foresee that you may need them.” There are a number of reasons why this principle exists.  Firstly, it maximizes...

…you are ready to embark on a Sprint, and you are planning it in Sprint Planning. The objective of a Sprint is to deliver value to the stakeholders. However, simply following a list of Sprint Backlog Items (SBIs; e.g., tasks) does not necessarily result in the creation of the greatest value possible. Because the team lays out its work plan...

I had an interesting incident while working with one of the organizations. One of the project managers was very happy the way his team was performing. When he came to me, he said, “My team is doing really good these days. They started with a lot of features in gone few sprints and their estimates...

The word ‘neck’ can be replaced with an appropriate one! In our last sprint we were not able to complete nearly 60% of the stories in our sprint. On the last day before the end of the sprint, everything was still in progress (say 70%) but nothing was done. Welcome to the real world! I...