Digital Tools for Sprint Backlog

A while ago, I ran into a couple of posts written by Bas Vodde on the LeSS blog in January 2020: Digital tools considered harmful – Sprint Backlog (https://less.works/blog/2020/01/10/digital-tools-considered-harmful-sprint-backlog.html) Digital tools considered harmful – Jira (https://less.works/blog/2020/01/16/digital-tools-considered-harmful-jira.html) These posts were written just as COVID was beginning to explode worldwide, so while what is written in there … Read more

The Caring and Respectful Product Owner

While reflecting on my recent activities, I started to recognise an interesting pattern regarding the role of the Product Owner. I’ve seen many of them coming from different parts of the organisations: form product management, from various levels of management, from system architecture or senior programmers. Because of the different skill sets they have, the … Read more

It’s not just about teams! – “Agile as a systemic change” presentation at the Italian Agile Day 2010

Agile has been a refreshing wind of change in the software development world. A very much needed one, actually. Yet, I believe these days a big part of the agile community is stuck in a cul-de-sac called the teams! What’s wrong with teams? Nothing really. Except that… they are just a model! A team is … Read more

Wishes – Messages – Questions

I recently had a situation where two teams based in two different locations had to start working together on a project. While waiting for a planned face to face meeting between them, I used the following technique to prepare each team for the upcoming meeting. When establishing a new co-operation with another team, each team … Read more

Looping

Have you ever wondered what makes Agile so special and so productive? My guess would be because it closes loops and allows fast and useful feedback. Extreme Programming is all about feedback, openly stated: pair programming, regression testing, continuous integration are all ways of generating the right feedback. Scrum is also based on feedback loops: … Read more