Stealthy and unavoidable, scope creep hovers over every software development project. Like any other agile practice, no two teams manage scope creep the same and teams at Atlassian are no exception. So we decided to go straight to the horse’s mouth…
I've written before that we should only estimate if having the estimate will change someone's actions. Normally, this means that the team should estimate work only if having the estimate will either: enable the product owner to better prioritize the…
With over 500k agile projects in JIRA (among just Cloud customers – wow!), we realized we’re sitting on a ton of data that sheds light on how agile teams function. We then bet, that with some anonymized data mining, we…
Can you develop new products from scratch in one day? This challenge was taken on by the Medical HW manufacturer Optinova in August. Over the course of two days, we pushed the limits of “what is possible” by applying Agile…
At a large big room planning (BRP) event run by one of our customers recently, between 400 and 500 people spent two days planning their next 12 weeks of work. The stakes were high, as the health care product they…
Many projects bog down during requirements gathering. This is dangerous because it wastes valuable time, often setting up a project to be late. To avoid this problem, I like to engage users and stakeholders in very lightweight story-writing workshops. Before…
A very oft-cited metric is that 64 percent of features in products are “rarely or never used.” The source for this claim was Jim Johnson, chairman of the Standish Group, who presented it in a keynote at the XP 2002…
Rally customers have always been front and center at RallyON conferences — filling the audience and the speaking agenda with their experiences, knowledge, and ideas. But at this year's RallyON 2015 conference, our customers were so engaged they nearly blew up the…
I’ve noticed something disturbing over the past two years. And it’s occurred uniformly with teams I’ve worked with all across the world. It’s the tendency to create an iterative waterfall process and then to call it agile. An iterative waterfall…
This post is cross-posted from the Gosei page at their blog Scaling Agility or Bureaucracy There are two very different strategies in adopting Agile in a large organisation, horizontal or vertical. In other words, you may take one product first…