While the advantages of agile appear obvious, I observe that many IT departments stick stubbornly to waterfall. Despite failure after failure, IT managers blame the people—staff members, vendors, users—rather than the process. Waterfall organizes software projects into distinct sequential stages:…

Let me say up front that I’m a biased reviewer. I attend the SF Bay Area Agile meet-up organized by Agile Learning Labs, where both authors work. In fact, I won a copy of this book at the last meet-up…

At a recent meet up of the Bay Area Agile Managers Support Group. Alan Shalloway presented on Lean-Agile for Managers. He explained that agile is about small batches, lean about managing the flow. The key is to speed the time…

At the Agile Meetup in San Mateo yesterday evening, Steve Bockman of Agile Learning Labs led us through a simulation of the Team Estimation Game. Steve invented the game as an alternative to Planning Poker, a popular Scrum technique for…

This past Wednesday evening I attended the Agile meet-up in San Mateo where Chris Sims of Agile Learning Labs presented on story mapping, an alternative to the Scrum backlog. What I found interesting, however, was not so much story mapping…

Ok, if you’ve not heard the joke yet, here it goes. The chicken suggests to his friend the pig that they open a restaurant called ham and eggs. No thanks, replies the pig, while you would be merely involved, it…