Way back when, when we were learning Agile as a company, we sometimes hesitated to present it as such to our clients. We weren't sure how clients would take it. We took what might call it a "stealth Agile" approach. Over time we got more confident with it and could point to successes as well as a few failures. But we learned from both. From that experience we extracted a few rules of thumb that are good to remember. In this post, I want to share those rules of thumb with you.

Keeping aligned is really important to Agile teams and, according to the Scrum methodology, daily standup meetings are the tool of choice for that. When done effectively, they provide visibility and transparency to all stakeholders. Just as importantly, they help the team catch problems early.

Late deliveries are a nightmare—especially if you are ”the face” of the team and you have to explain the reasons for it to either your customer or end users.  In this post I intend to list three reasons why your project might be late and some suggestions to a) fix it and b) avoid the same problems in the future.

 I’m not a fan of using story points, however, one way or the other, estimates are a very important step in any project and a key to delivering on-time.  The result of not doing it is downright awful, and everybody in the team suffers the consequences.  In this post I want to share the steps we follow to make estimates.

You are about to start a new project, congratulations!  You are starting an exciting journey where you will gain new experience, learn some lessons and remove some barriers.  You’ll figure out something here and there, but absolutely nothing that you can’t deal with.  Unless, that is, you screw up the whole thing from the very start.  If you are in software development, I bet you know how to do that.  I certainly do.

In a previous post feels I wrote about how teams struggle with the same problems over and over again. This post adds a few more common mistakes to this list how to address them.

It feels like déjà vu all over again.  A team of experienced developers is having trouble meeting its deliverables.  It feels just like the last team that struggled with the same problem.  Even when you’ve instituted Scrum, you’ll have to pay attention to these issues every day.  Here’s a list of common mistakes and how to address them.

Scrum, unit testing, code reviews and automated daily builds practices are not an end—they’re just the means to creating quality products, on time, every time.

This is my second posting and I want to talk about how we’ve implemented SCRUM at Nearsoft.

Yesterday, while talking to a friend of mine about her job, she told me that her boss was not letting her grow and was limiting her and her peers' participation in the company.