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It’s always been possible to descope work in the Scrum for Team System template. But the method employed in Version 2.2 whilst functional, was quite fiddly, overly manual and not very “Scrummy”. When building 3.0 we took the opportunity to revamp the way in which it worked and better utilise the power of the Event Service (something you can see ...

As awareness of Kanban grows, people are naturally wanting to learn more about it; especially if they’ve tried Scrum and found it challenging or failed to reap any perceivable benefits from it. At first glance, many people see the basic difference between Scrum & Kanban being that one system has time boxes, and the other does not. Another ...

On Tuesday the 20th of October I'm chairing a panel on Product Owner best practices at the Scrum Gathering in Munich. I'd like to introduce my panel members. I've tried to balance out the consultant and authors with some people who are working with Scrum and Product Ownership issues on a daily basis in a variety of circumstances. So (apart from ...

There has been some small amount of confusion around the Scrum for Team System version numbers, especially with the popularity of the 2010 TFS Beta.   This short post should help clarify things.   Version Latest Release TFS version Next version Expected 1.x 1.2 ...

There is a classic American Western movie cliché where the sheriff, in an attempt to catch an outlaw, calls for the organization of a ‘posse’.  By western movie definition, a posse seems to be a band of people that have just stumbled out of the saloon and with much enthusiasm, whiskey, bad teeth and various weapons charge out of the town on ...

To support the release of Beta 1 of Scrum for Team System 3.0 for 2010, this is the first in a series of blog posts that will help you prepare for the release of the template and better plan your adoption strategy. Scrum for Team System 3.0 (for TFS 2010) brings with it many changes, many of which work together to produce what I believe is our ...

  I read my colleague Simon Munro’s recent post about deferring costs to the future and how he thinks this should apply to the software development process. As a developer who is an advocate of all the things that Simon claims are simply improving future maintainability at a higher cost, I felt compelled to give a different opinion. On my ...

Our leaders are doing it – spending large sums of money now bailing out banks with the assumption that one day, when the recession is over, that there will be someone to pick up the tab. And as individuals we are doing the same thing – if my boiler were to need replacing tomorrow I may forgo the top-of-the-range model with a four year guarantee in ...

Scrum for Team System version 2.2 was recently released. The most significant new project management report is the Velocity Report.   The velocity report tracks the historical "burn rate" for a team in such a manner to allow for truly accurate release planning. Throughout this post I'll use the term "Story Points" as ...

I'm a big fan of lists. Heck - show me a project manager who isn't a fan of lists! I'm especially fond of lists that explain how not to do something. This way, I feel as though I'm learning from the expensively-gained experience of others.The list isn't meant to be exhaustive and isn't meant to be in order, but I hope this list proves useful to ...