Publications

The following blog provides a set of free, downloadable agile coaching cards that can be used by Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters and teams working in many different contexts. These cards have been developed while working outside of software and product development with government Defence teams and I’ve used these cards to teach agility and help develop an agile mind set.

In this series of posts we wil explore the Events that either perform, schedule or track the activities that affect the Lifecycle of an Epic. This second post looks at how the events that run the Portfolio could be structured.

In this series of posts we wil explore the Events that either perform, schedule or track the activities that affect the Lifecycle of an Epic. This first post looks at the activites that the Portfolio needs to perform in order for it to make progress.

Epics have a lifecycle, they don’t magically appear fully formed. There is work to be done to progressively elaborate a business case and if the Epic is approved then there is further work to progress the Epic through implementation. This post looks at some of the alternate scenarios that might be seen in the Epic lifecycle, covering Bad Ideas, Small Ideas, Lean-Startup and Exploring Options.

If you try find a definitive description of ‘The Spotify Model’ you will most likely end up frustrated. There are some old videos and blog posts, and lots of internet articles claiming that it isn’t a ‘proper’ framework and that even Spotify doesn’t use it. Yet, it is reported as the fourth most popular scaled agile framework according to the 15th State of Agile Report and there are thousands of companies claiming to be using it.  So, what is it? And if you want to adopt it, where do you start?

Epics have a lifecycle, they don’t magically appear fully formed. There is work to be done to progressively elaborate a business case and if the Epic is approved then there is further work to progress the Epic through implementation. In this post we’ll explore the Portfolio Kanban that visualises the lifecycle of an Epic and look at some of the decisions that influence the Epic’s progress through its lifecycle.  

Epics have a lifecycle, they don’t magically appear fully formed. There is work to be done to progressively elaborate a business case and if the Epic is approved then there is further work to progress the Epic through implementation. This post explores the Lifecycle of an Epic and the states it progresses through in that Lifecycle.

Serious games are games that do not have entertainment, enjoyment or fun as their primary purpose. There are many examples of serious games in the video game industry, but any game that has a serious purpose can be a serious game. For instance; card games, team games, sorting games or timed activities. The book and website Gamestorming describes dozens of ‘games’ that are played in person and address business problems in creative, engaging and most importantly, effective ways. Some examples you may recognize are SWOT Analysis, Brainwriting, World Café and Affinity Mapping.

This article explores the synergy of Scrum and Essence, a domain model of software engineering processes, intending to become a common ground for software development methods, bringing clarity into the composition of methods from individual practices.

What do we mean by Quality? The word Quality is commonly used in software development, but it isn’t always clear what is meant by it. Teams create Definitions of Done, configure thresholds in their CI/CD pipeline, write performance tests and agree service level agreements, but are these sufficient for the level of Quality the customer expects?