Why are we so slow in delivering software

Why are we so slow in delivering software?

Why are established companies so much slower in delivering software compared to a startup company? I will give you four reasons. About ten years ago...
How to lead self-managing teams

How to lead self-managing teams – Book review

To my surprise, there are a lot of parallels between leading self-managing teams and managing beehives. I recently read a great book called "How To...
Mad Glad Sad

Mad Glad Sad Retrospective

The Mad Glad Sad Retrospective is a format to gather data in the Scrum Retrospective meeting. Here I am going to explain how you can use the Mad Glad...
Migrate From Team Foundation Version Control To Git

Migrate From TFVC To Git – 5 Simple Steps

I talk extensively why you should migrate from Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) to Git in my guest post at simple programmer, which will be...
Scrum Retrospective 5 - Close The Retrospective

Scrum Retrospective 5 – Close The Retrospective

This is the fifth and last post of my blog post series about the five phases of a Scrum Retrospective. In this post I cover Phase 5— Close the...
Scrum Retrospective 4 - Decide What To Do

Scrum Retrospective 4 – Decide What To Do

This is the fourth post of my blog post series about the five phases of a Scrum Retrospective. In this post I cover Phase 4— Decide What To Do. If you...
Scrum Retrospective 3 - Generate Insights

Scrum Retrospective 3 – Generate Insights

This is the third post of my blog post series about the five phases of a Scrum Retrospective.In this post I cover the Phase 3— Generate Insights. If...
Scrum Retrospective 2 - Gather Data

Scrum Retrospective 2 – Gather Data

This is the second post of my blog post series about the five phases of a Scrum Retrospective.In this post I cover the most crucial ideas for Stage...
Scrum Retrospective 1 - Setting The Stage

Scrum Retrospective 1 – Setting The Stage

This is the first post of my blog post series about the five phases of a Scrum Retrospective. I will cover the most crucial ideas for Phase 1 —...
5 major problems with synchronous code reviews

5 Major Problems With Synchronous Code Reviews

If your teams does not use git as a source control system then you should continue reading. Because then you most likely use the synchronous code...
4 types of code reviews

4 Types Of Code Reviews Any Developer Should Know

Every professional software developer knows that a code review should be part of any serious development process. But what most developers don´t know...
Scrum of Scrums

Scrum of Scrums

The Scrum of Scrums is a meeting on inter-team level with the purpose to surface dependencies between teams and align their collaboration. In this...
Understanding Docker With Visual Studio 2017 Part 2

Understanding Docker with Visual Studio 2017 – Part 2

In Part 1 of the series "Understanding Docker with Visual Studio 2017" I described what you need to prepare to get docker up and running on your...
Understanding Docker With Visual Studio 2017 Part 1

Understanding Docker with Visual Studio 2017 – Part 1

Containerization of applications using Docker with Visual Studio 2017 is trendy, but it is not so easy to understand what is happening in the...
Netherlands biggest interest in Scrum

Netherlands biggest interest in Scrum worldwide

How interested are people in Scrum? Is it´s popularity growing or declining? What about the interest in Agile or DevOps? A few days ago I stumbled...
The Power of Habit

The power of habit – executing tasks automatically

A habit is something that you do often and regularly, sometimes without even knowing that you are doing it. The great thing about habits is that you...
Will power

Will Power – Discipline can be trained

Will power, or you can also call it discipline, is the ability to control yourself. The interesting thing about will power is that it behaves like a...
Nexus Framework

Nexus – the scaling Scrum framework

Nexus is a framework, which builds on top of the scrum framework and is designed for scaling. It focuses on solving cross-team dependencies and...
Scrum Values

Scrum values – new section in scrum guide

The scrum guide, the official description of the scrum working methodology, has been recently extended with a new section: the scrum values. Before we...
Acceptance criteria

Acceptance criteria – an easy way of defining scope

Acceptance criteria are a straight-forward way of describing, what needs to be in place before a task can be marked as done. You might have...
Hackathon

Hackathon

You have great ideas, but there is no time nor money to work on those? Then a Hackathon might be exactly, what can help you to get those ideas...
Scrum does not work

Scrum does not work for us

Coming up with a good estimation for a complex task is possible - even if you don't know the possible options to complete a task...
Defining a sprint goal

Sprint Goal – Boost productivity by defining focus

Defining a sprint goal in the planning meeting helps to keep the team focused during the sprint and also facilitates collaboration within the team...
Can you plan for operational Work

Can you plan for operational work?

Planning operational work is difficult, because you don't know at the time of planning, what and how many operational tasks you have to work on in the...
Definition of story points

Definition of story points

Story points are all about effort and only about effort. A story point has nothing to do with complexity or uncertainty of a user story...
The Core Scrum Checklist

Core Scrum CHECKLIST – Doing real scrum?

The core scrum checklist is a great and easy way to determine whether you are doing real scrum...
TraditionalVsEmpirical

Traditional vs empirical process

What are the differences when you implement a project using the traditional approach vs an empirical way of working? During a scrum workshop, which I...
Product ownership

Agile Product ownership in a nutshell

How would you explain to your grandmother what an agile team is and how it works? For that I found a very nice video, which explains all the different...
StartStopContinueRetrospective

Start-Stop-Continue Retrospective

Is your team bored with the way you do your retrospective meeting? Is it always the same after every sprint? Then why don´t you try something new? I...
TeamDysfunctions

The 5 levels of team dysfunctions

I recently attended a scrum master training, where we were discussing the five dysfunctions of a team. This model has been introduced by Patrick...
Reference task

How to choose a reference task

A reference task is a certain task, which has a fixed amount of story points assigned, and which is used as a reference point to estimate other tasks...
Why your own blog

Why you should have your own blog

I wanted to have my own blog for a very long time. But I didn´t know, which content I can put there. I am not such a smart-ass and come up with great...
StoryPointsVsHourlyEstimations

Why you should prefer story points over hourly estimations

Every now and then people ask "What is a story point?" And then somebody gives the answer like "A story point in our team is about 3-5 hours work for...
Stacey complexity model

Why agile? – The Stacey complexity model

The stacey complexity model categorizes tasks in four different categories: simple, complicated, complex and anarachy. Then the model explains for...