Construx Blogs
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A discussion on the LinkedIn Certified Scrum Master board led me to read an article on Mike Cohn’s blog titled, “It’s Effort, Not Complexity.” Mike argues that stakeholders don’t care about how hard it is to do something, they care about how long it will take. Fair enough...
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Dear Construx: How do you deal with the risk of Story Point inflation throughout a Scrum project? My team goes through release planning, ending up with a backlog where each item has been estimated using story points. Based upon our estimates of story points and team velocity, we predict, and commit to...
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One thing I’m often asked is, how do you come up with valid project estimates in Scrum? After all, Scrum doesn’t want you to worry about more than the current sprint, does it? The basic rule of estimation is, estimate size/effort/complexity and then derive duration. For Scrum, we follow the industry...
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p {font-size: 10 pt; font-family: arial; line-height: 1.6} li {font-size: 10 pt; font-family: arial; line-height: 1.6} fprolloverstyle>a:hover {color: #0055aa; text-decoration: underline} Construx Software Executive Summit 2010 Steve McConnell Fred Brooks Tom DeMarco Tim Lister Scott Berkun A rare...
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One question that I often hear is, “Do we have to implement Scrum by the book, or should we adapt it to our environment?” The answer is, “Yes!” You should do both. And, they are not mutually exclusive. To me, 'keeping Scrum pure' means adopting the three roles, four meetings, four artifacts,...
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I love this one; blows the mind of many a project manager: if you add select items to your work plan, you can shorten the project schedule. Absurd you say? You may be right, let’s take a deeper look. Any good development planning should start out with the high level details of only the work needed to...
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That should be the real question that any project should ask. Far too often the purpose of project work is to make lot of different customers happy. We get requirements from every Tom, ***, and Harry, from the business, from marketing, from sales, from the technology gurus, from the people who will have...
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Construx is looking for a trainer/consultant. Construx has a fantastic staff and unmatched benefits. For the well qualified person who wants to do excellent work in a highly stimulating environment, it is a dream job -- which is why we've been recognized as the Best Small Company to Work for in Washington...
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The 2010 Executive Council for Software Excellence (ECSE) meeting topics have been announced. They are: January Optimizing for Innovation February Accelerating Organizational Change March Successful Leadership in Software Development April Managing the Release Process May Managing "Core" Development...
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A reader of our 2008 Classic Mistakes White Paper made the following observation: I work in the Aerospace/Defense industry and have read your article called Software Development's Classic Mistakes 2008 dated July 2008. I am most interested in questioning the results of your most damaging classic...
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Astute followers of my blog (Hi, Mom!) will have noticed that all of my previous posts are now attributed to “Anonymous”. Same as my forum responses to date. Why? Well, I accidently deleted myself from the site. “Smooth move, ex-lax,” my mom would tell me if she actually did read my blog. A little background...
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The more I work with companies that are struggling with Scrum, the more I’m starting to believe that ‘hybrid’ Scrum adoptions, where people pick and choose which Scrum practices to follow and which to ignore, invariably lead to failure. Whoa! you say… Wait a minute! Agile is about doing what is right...
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…and start solving them. Sounds great, but what does it mean? What’s the difference between managing a problem and solving it? I recently held a workshop on using Scrum to drive process improvement at CIISA 2009 , held in Guadalajara, Mexico, where I focused on using Scrum as a process improvement...
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If you build EXACTLY what “they” tell you, you do it in the timeframe they ask for, and at the cost they wanted to pay, is that a successful project? The project is On time On budget Delivers the requested functionality No defects The team is ready for the next project Is it successful? “Yes,” you say...
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I recently went with trepidation into a class with Pragmatic Marketing called “ Requirements that Work ”, part of their Practical Product Management series. Marketing professionals have been my foil for bad requirements for years and here I was, ready to hear from the experts themselves how marketing...
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Many teams moving to Scrum have questions about the Product Owner position. Is the Product Owner a member of the Scrum team? What role does the Product Owner play in the day-to-day life of a Scrum project? How do we map current functional roles to Scrum roles, specifically with regard to the Product...
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One benefit of my job is that I get to talk to people from hundreds of companies every year, and the people I work with talk to even more people. In recent discussions I've seen a disturbing trend emerging -- disturbing because it's so common and because the effects are so easily predictable...
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A question was posed on one of the Scrum discussion forums recently about changing the sprint backlog during a sprint. The scenario was as follows: the sprint has been running for 2 days when the Product Owner comes to the daily standup and wants to replace a committed sprint backlog item with one of...
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Getting better in software development requires change and change is hard and change is unpleasant. Most of all, it doesn’t seem like we actually change. We talk about change, we start change initiatives, they pay people to teach us new ways, we may even read books, but at the end of the day we seem...
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Is Scrum really only valuable to folks who care about agility (or Agility)? Let's say I'm running a project with defined requirements, fixed scope, a fixed schedule (firm completion/release date), and fixed resources. What advantages does Scrum offer over other project management methodologies...
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Welcome to the first post on my new software development blog! Let me tell you a little about myself. I'm an experienced software developer, tester, program and project manager, QA manager, and development team manager, with over two decades of experience in high tech. I've worked at small startups...
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I have recently read a book called “ Change or Die ” by Alan Deutschman that has some good insights on how people change deeply held behavior. I like to share some thoughts inspired from (and some outright lifted from) the book. We spend a lot of time talking about change. We want to become more agile...
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Construx has developed the State of the Practice Survey with the goal of better understanding which software practices really work, which really don't work, and identify trends in practice adoption. Survey participants will receive a summary report of the findings later this year in advance of the...
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It is not uncommon for me to see on blog posts, newsgroups, or presentations the phrase or comment that something is not, "in the spirit of Agile". In fact a project team could be doing many of the practices of Agile but, if it fails, the agilist will claim that the project was not Agile in...
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I now have a public Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/n/?pages/Steve-McConnell/198720075270&mid=8a4602G316afb94G1ae8a37G4c . I plan to use this page for small scale blog entries, updates on what I'm reading, announcements, and so on.
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