Succeeding to Fail in Agile

In an Agile environment everyone needs to understand that ‘being Agile’ is about taking the framework of tools, processes and methodologies and applying them to your specific organizational needs. At Disney where I was part of a group that moved into Agile, our first foray into Agile Discovery and Planning was, well an epic fail. We we didn’t produce any work product that would allow us to enter a Sprint.  We developed a lot of ‘stuff’ but as it was at is it turned out, not the ‘right’ stuff.

But from that initial failure we evaluated what did work (group Discovery) and what didn’t (PO not taking ownership of story development).  From there we were able to begin to understand the ‘what’ that was important and over the course of around six months we developed a pretty solid delivery model that allowed the organization to feel confident in our delivery abilities.

Now, what worked for us at Disney more than likely won’t work for your organization.  The only way to find out is to try something, anything and see how it goes.

If you want to be a virtuosos at any musical instrument you need to practice, hour upon hour of repetition.  Along this long road of preparation you will find some efforts easy, others hard.  You will fail at mastering some part of a technique that just seems so difficult, you feel you will never get past that point and then you will try something else and BAM, you got it.

From our failures comes learning, the type of learning that becomes part of your DNA. Your mind takes over and can put thinking in the background as you play your instrument.

To be great in Agile, your organization has to change its very DNA.  If you want to succeed, you have to fail and you have to fail often and quickly.

You hear that a lot in Agile when we are talking about our test automation, let it fail early and often. We know that fixing issues while still in development is significantly cheaper than fixing them in Production.

Make sure you instill in your organization, management support for succeeding to fail.

Baseball players get into the Hall of Fame for succeeding to fail at a 70% clip, if you bat over .300 for your career you have a good chance of making it to Cooperstown.

As your teams embark on their Agile journey, keep these concepts in mind to ensure you are driving towards success:

  • Self-organization – We want this to happen and for teams to be empowered, because they know more than anyone, what the real pain points are to their daily work.  Let them try something to see if it works no matter how crazy you may think it sounds.
  • Retrospectives – Make sure that a team that is self organized and is empowered to try new approaches is having regular post Sprint retrospectives.  This continuous inspect and adapt cycle ensures that we are always evaluating what works and what doesn’t.

In the end if things aren’t working - TRY SOMETHING. What do you have to lose?

Investment Portfolio Management Applied to Product Management

I've been telling myself that I needed to attempt to apply formal investment portfolio management techniques to how we value, prioritize and manage our portfolio of product development efforts, so here goes (definitely still a work in progress)
Back in 1950's Dr. Harry Markowitz created an investment model called the 'Efficient Portfolio'.  Markowitz stipulated with his theory that an "Efficient Portfolio is one where no added diversification can lower the portfolio's risk for a given return expectation (alternately, no additional expected return can be gained without increasing the risk of the portfolio)".
The Markowitz Efficient Frontier is the set of all portfolios that will give the highest expected return for each given level of risk.
This model set the framework for how current money managers build a portfolio of securities that provide range of investment returns to meet each investors risk profile.  Providing investors with a broad range of risk/return choices allows individual investors to build an investment portfolio that meets their specific risk threshold with respect to a given rate of return.
An efficient portfolio looks like this:
 Efficient Frontier
When you are younger and have time to take chances your risk/return profile might be higher on the frontier, whereas at retirement you will slide down that scale as you are more interested in protecting your total investment.  One thing to note is that if your risk/return data falls above the efficient frontier, then you are accepting a level of risk that is not in line with the rate of return you might receive.  Pushing past the efficient frontier can open you up to unexpectedly high returns but conversely you can also expect very high negative returns due to the risk you are taking on.
Product Development organizations can utilize the Frontier as well, for example, a young startup will have a much higher appetite for risk as they understand that to take market share from competitors they need to take risks with speed to market.  However there are specific elements of risk that need to be considered as you speed your product to market.  Ensuring that Usability has been considered, Prototypes have been developed, code quality is considered and test automation all need to play part when you are building your risk/return Efficient Frontier for your Product Portfolio.
If we were to apply the Efficient Frontier to how we manage our Software Development investments we could build a risk/return profile that is easy to understand and align with the organizations risk/return profile.   There are many software projects that at inception are known to be risky, however a lack of empirical data often means that the projects will get the green light and then fail miserably.  The organizations inability to accurately asses risk/return at any time with their software development investments is a huge blind spot and keeps us from consistently delivering the value that the organization needs to stay competitive.
Agile addresses the value (return) part of what the Efficient Frontier speaks to however it talks nothing of Risk overtly.  Risk is more implied with the notion that we manage it by delivering in short increments and focus on shipping value consistently.  However Risk is more quantifiable as I mentioned earlier.
Building an Efficient Frontier in the investment world is a data intensive effort, which our current product/software development processes doesn't easily support.  However I believe that we can use the formula that Markowitz created to generate an Efficient Frontier for Product and Software Development organizations.
For this effort we will make some assumptions with respect to the Frontier model and changes to Markowitz's formula so that it works with our limited data set:
  1. Portfolio = Product Development
    1. An organization can have several Products in their Portfolio -
      1. Consumer Facing
      2. Internal Facing
      3. Infrastructure
      4. Research and Development
  2. A security is equivalent to a Scrum Team.
    1. These would equate to the individual securities that Markowitz speaks to in his model.  Where an investment portfolio consists of many securities, each with their own risk/return profiles so to does an organizations product development portfolio consist of the same.  Each team is a security that can on its own provide return that comes with an associated risk.
    2. Though we don't think of investment securities as having dependencies (as software development teams have) in fact a diversified investment portfolio consists of a range of investments that will perform a certain way based upon the dependency that business has to the market that they operate in, so in this case the notion of a portfolio still holds as a viable means to build a Product Development Efficient Frontier.
  3. Potential Risk Parameters:
    1. Development Lifecycle - Waterfall, Agile, RUP, XP, Blended (use at macro level). You could equate this potentially to Bonds, Stocks or other investment instruments.
    2. Experience of Team
    3. Number of Scrum Teams
    4. % Test Automation
    5. Code Complexity
    6. Speed to Market
    7. Roadmap volatility

In my next post I'll provide some supporting ways we can 'build' an efficient frontier for Agile Product Portfolio analysis that both Product and Program Managers can utilize to assess priorities for the entire organizational backlog.

Monetizing Agile Projects





    1. Team Size - 5
    2. Blended Rate - $125 an hour
    3. Hourly team rate - $625
    4. Cost of Sprint(2 weeks) - $50,000
    1. Estimated Development Cost - $250,000
  4. Expected ROI in the first year - 300%








Agile Planning and Delivery









The example I've been using recently is this:








Scaling Governance in Agile

Large organizations who move towards and Agile delivery model may struggle with how to scale any governance model.

I think if you polled most Agilists about governance in general, you would tend to get a shutter and an ugly stare.  Indeed we want to address technical excellence during our sprints but what we often fail to understand is that software engineers are not omniscient when it comes to all of the areas of technical acumen related to performance, security and other compliance type efforts.
As an organization grows and becomes more and more global it finds itself dealing with many different governing bodies that each have different requirements for how we deal with data protection, which in turn relates to how we develop our software.
Having run PCI compliance for a large organization I know first hand that providing specific information to developers with respect to what to look for just in a code review is an important first step.
Governance is needed for most organizations as a first defense when something happens with respect to security/privacy.  Organizations need processes in place to provide evidence to governing bodies, courts and legal inquires regarding how we protect our product our customers information.
Governance can include both standards and artifacts.  For example PCI compliance requires that we provide evidence of compliance with respect to their 13 security requirements.   From a software development standpoint these include such activities as code reviews that are focused on security, software development cycle, evidence of secure development and test practices in addition other efforts such as  Penetration testing and other monitoring capabilities.
In Agile we need to think of this in a light weight manner.  At one organization we implemented a set of standardized stories, non-functional, that were to be included into a teams feature development sprints.  For teams that are working on several sprint efforts before going into production this can work very well as the team is addressing this as part of the planning and estimation.  When the code is delivered to production the completed and accepted user stories (which have context as to what was completed) serve as the artifact for the PCI compliance (or other) auditors.
The engineers liked this because they were creating artifacts as they developed and from an organization standpoint we gained confidence in the fact that our code was being developed against high quality standards.
For Governance activities that relate to more ongoing product sustainment efforts the same standards need to apply however the manner in which we apply them within each sprint may be different that new product type efforts.  Automated testing and monitoring form a larger basis of maintaining the standard levels that we established in earlier cycles.
Recently I heard a statistic that said 90% of attacks can be mitigated by the basic block and tackle work that teams can do on a regular basis.
Governance doesn't have to be a bad name in the Agile space, we need to view it as part of our technical excellence efforts that form the basis of high performing Agile teams.
I think Governance is an area in Agile that is ripe for development especially at scale.

BDD - Step by Step Process Tutorial










BDD Training

Agile Testing







PMO Role in Agile - Part 2

My initial blog seemed to have some interest judging by the number of views it's received so I'm guessing that it's a topic that many are looking for input on.   So I thought I'd provide some more thoughts as to what a PMOmight  look like in an Agile organization. One of the key things that changes with a traditional Project managed organization is that they must change to one that is Product managed.  What this means is that the organization changes the way that it funds its business by essentially providing Product Owners with Scrum teams that will deliver on their vision for their product.  Given this paradigm, along with the creation of the Scrum Master role, the PMO and subsequent project managers are left outside looking in.

Managing Product driven teams means that you are managing towards outcomes that delivery value over projects that deliver features.

In my previous post I provided some suggestions as to what individual Project Managers could do to make themselves more valuable and productive to their teams.

In this post I will suggest a PMO structure that focuses on the Portfolio view and leaves the operational execution of the roadmap to the Scrum Teams and Product Owner.

For this structure to work the organization needs good Scrum Masters and preferable ones that aren't also individual contributors for their team.

The structure of the PMO will be lighter than you might think is right, but I'll argue that if you have the same number of Scrum Masters and Project Managers you will set up role confusion that will make your entire project management process cumbersome and less productive.

The PMO structure would look something like this:

PMO Org View - Agile

I think one of the things that a PMO organization needs to be aware of is that their focus is not on control of projects and people but on how teams are performing.

With this structure you have a thinner level of Project Managers who are focused on Program level Product Management (PPM new acryonym anyone?). Your Project Management function becomes one of oversight of Scrum Masters and working closely with Program Managers in other Product groups who probably will have cross org dependencies.  The Program Manager level in this structure is more about working to ensure that teams are working on the right things based upon the Product Roadmap and escalating when individual team priorities become out of line with the overal corporate product objectives.

What we want with a PMO is confidence and how we do that historically is to place controls, gateways and processes designed to show that teams are checking off boxes that we believe represent how a successful project should unfold (aka Project Governance)

How we do that in an Agile organization is to ensure that our teams we have a clear Product roadmap, that we are performing effective planning both in the areas of Product Discovery and Release Planning, that teams are provided time to review and estimate the work that they are being asked to commit to AND ensure that teams perform continual inspect and adapt cycles via Retrospectives.

If teams are allowed to form into solid high performing teams what you get from that is an organization that learns how to estimate accurately, which leads to consistent velocity which in turns leads to predictability....which is what we in the PMO (and Sr Management) are looking for, simple right?

What I learned years ago from my Project Management days is that Agile actually provides you with much more visibility and transparency about what is happening with your commitments,  providing you as the stewards of the product an ability to have fact based conversations with stakeholders who rarely understand the complexity of what they are asking for.

PMO Role in Agile

If you lead a PMO or are a PM and your organization is embarking on an Agile adoption you are probably thinking so how do I fit into this new paradigm and still manage the work that I'm currently managing (it won't manage itself is what you are thinking) ?

Organizations who are now moving towards Agile as a product delivery/SDLC method will find themselves trying to figure out where their PMO and subsequent Project Managers will fit.

The problems they face are several:
Traditional Project Managers:
  • Are experienced at managing to a specific plan and resolving resource issues that their specific projects are facing.  They are not typically assigned to just one project and the people they work with come and go with much frequency.  Project Managers have been for many years the ones who provide confidence that 'someone' has their hands on the pulse of the projects that are designed to deliver value to the organization.
  • Don't typically look at their projects as value driven, rather they are priority and resource driven.  Their focus when they are assigned to a project is about who is on my team, who can I steal from other projects and creating a plan that is often not vetted by the very people who will actually do the work and socializing that with Sr Management.
  • Traditional Project Managers are excellent deflectors of blame (yep I learned quickly how to push off issues on to someone else)
  • Are not typically contributing members of the team.
I don't say these things to make Project Managers angry, I was once a PM and a very good one at that (or so I believe).  And I'm not at all implying that there isn't a role for PM's in Agile, but I will suggest that how you think as a PM will need to change.
For starters you need to find a way to be a contributing member of the team and not just someone who sits on the sidelines like a reporter and records what is going on to report out.
The thing that was different about me was that I always managed my teams more like a Scrum Master would.  I found ways to contribute, I gained the trust of my team, I protected them and provided guidance for individuals when they were struggling with something about the organization that didn't make sense.  This process of engagement led me out of the PM role and ultimately into QA Management so there are growth opportunities for PM's if you are open to learning new things.
If the team needs help in testing, learn something new and help out.
Most Agilists' may tell you that the Scrum Master and Project Manager role are completely different.  Though they are different I would argue that project managers can fill the void of Scrum Master and gain great insight to their projects and be on point to resolve impediments more easily than be bystanders to the entire Agile process.
Here are some key areas that Project Managers should focus on during an Agile Transformation:
  1. Planning - Is not a function of setting forth an unyielding plan.  Rather planning by the team is to facilitate an ever growing understanding of what the team is building.  Big Up Front Requirements convey a static nature to projects that simply doesn't exist.  If you disagree actually track the number of times the team has to change their plans (for architecture, etc..) during a typical non-Agile project.  Teams that try to predict the future are destined to be wrong a majority of the time.  You need to become comfortable with a plan that identifies in detail only 4 weeks out.
    1. Goal - Be an active member of the team and be able to understand both the technical issues that are facing the team and bring them a clear understanding of dependencies with projects and teams that aren't in their viewfinder.
    2. GoalLearn different Agile planning techniques.  One of the key things that people miss in Agile adoption is that Planning needs to take place more often and that some level of upfront Discovery is not a bad thing.
  2. Scrum/Agile  Activities - A Project Manager for a Scrum Team needs to:
    1. Ensure that their teams are performing effective User Story development with techniques such as BDD and Specification by Example.
    2. Ensure that their teams have a well groomed set of stories in their backlog
    3. Ensure that their teams have effective Sprint Planning and Estimation sessions
    4. Ensure that the teams utilize their Retrospectives to drive continuous improvement
      1. Goal - Become an Agile evangilist, learn everything you can about Scrum, Story writing, TDD, Continuous Integration, User Story Mappiing, BDD, Specification by Example.
  3. Program Management - Is driven by the overall roadmap.  Ensuring that Scrum teams are aligning their user stories to appropriate Road Map Items keeps the organization focused on execution progress/success and provides the PMO with a clear view to all of the work that they are managing.  As an organization scales this is no small feat, so getting large sets of teams to keep up with story writing and roadmap linking is an administrative task that teams quickly tire of.  Project Managers need to provide support and assistance with the management of these types of activities in conjunction with their PO and Scrum Master.
  4. Technical Knowledge - Though this isn't as big of a problem as it was 10 years ago, many Project Managers simply don't understand the underlying technical platform that their teams are working in.  I personally don't think that you can be an effective project manager unless you have this knowledge.  Take the time to learn, your team will appreciate it and you will be able to have better fact based conversations with your Stakeholders regarding issues that delay delivery of projects.

BDD - Breaking down stories

One of the areas that many teams struggle with is getting user stories to the right level of context.  For me context IS everything in user stories.

 Yes a story is a placeholder for a conversation, but with large complex systems and organizations, the need to build out (and document) context has many benefits for teams and the organization.
Over the years I've seen some consistent elements fall out of BDD that can provide teams with an understanding of when a User Story may need to be broken down.
As you begin to build your test scenarios for your user story ensure that the story has no more than 3-4 scenarios.  If the number of scenarios is large, getting a clear contextual understanding of the story becomes much harder.  Additionally if automation is part of the equation then you end up with a larger code base for a single story and it can make trouble shooting failures harder.  Smaller stories mean less complicated acceptance criteria and more manageable and scalable automation code.
Once you have identified your test scenarios and begin writing the supporting BDD acceptance criteria look for some of these elements as queues to potentially break down your stories:
  1. Large set of parameters- If you see that you have more than 7-8 parameters in an individual test scenario consider breaking the test into additional scenario(s) or another story.  As I've taught my teams, if you see your example table stretching off the page you probably need to break it down.
  2. Large set of examples - If you see your test has more than 12-15 examples in an individual example table, you should consider breaking it down into additional scenario(s) or another story.
Keeping your stories and test examples small ensures that the team can more accurately estimate, deliver and demo their work consistently.
Teams should strive to break stories down so that they are small enough to be completed (Dev and Test) within 2-3 days.  This level of granularity provides clear visibility during Standups if the team is on track to deliver on their commitment.
Many teams suffer from what I call 'pushing a river down a creek' syndrome.  Meaning that they don't perform sufficient planning and story breakdown which leads them to continue to push their work out into future Sprints.  This leads to a lack of visibility as to when 'it will be done/delivered'
Breaking down stories effectively also leads teams to have stable velocities which leads to predictable delivery.  All of this feeds improved Program and Project management across the organization.
Organizations that need to scale Agile need to understand that this level of discipline isn't easy, but we shouldn't shy away from something just because it's hard.
BDD story breakdown leads to vastly improved feature definition, scalable automation suites and a strong automated regression.

The Agile Manager Conundrum


Effective managers in Agile focus on these areas:

BDD - A team oriented activity


  • Start of Sprint -
BDD Planning Cycle v1.00

Behavior Driven Development is more than Automation

Recently while working with an organization going through a large Agile adoption I had the opportunity to work with a team that was open to adopting BDD acceptance criteria story development.  One of the key differences for this team was that this was the first time that they had experienced a collaborative story development effort.  Prior to this most teams in the organization looked to the Product Owner to write all of the stories, which led to stories that were not contextually rich, had little to no acceptance criteria and were difficult to demo at the end of the sprint.
As I discussed the success of the teams use of BDD I was surprised to hear feedback that indicated the organization wasn't ready for the heavy lift of using BDD and that I hadn't moved the team into BDD because their final work wasn't automated.
If that is your position then I think you are missing the point of BDD.  Yes BDD is great in that when you right acceptance criteria in the Given/When/Then format and build your example tables correctly you can obtain automation fairly easily with tools such as Cucumber, Fitnesse and a whole host of tools that have been developed to support this very successful way to build out what I call 'contextually rich' user stories.
However even if you don't automate your BDD acceptance criteria, the value you get from understanding the behavior of the features you are going to build is invaluable.
BDD came about because Dan North realized that TDD and really great code meant nothing if it didn't deliver the value or functionality that the stakeholder needed.  This concept was clearly illustrated for me at one organization I worked for when the Development Manager was lamenting about a Product his team was enhancing was pulled from the market because they didn't deliver on time in order for the organization to stay competitive in the market.  He said 'If only they could see all of the cool code that we've written'....To which I said 'Business doesn't care about code they care about delivery" no matter how great your product is from a code perspective it matters not at all if you don't deliver it when your customer needs it.
For those of you who are exploring the use of BDD with your Scrum teams understand that there are essentially two separate efforts that effective teams are working on:
1. Team collaboration - Successful teams using BDD understand that they all need to be involved when building out user story context with Given/When/Then.  In fact I would argue that this is the most important element that drives a clear understanding of what we are building and guidance to when a user story is done.
2. Automation - One of key components of successful Agile teams is the development and maintenance of an effective automation suite.  Utilizing BDD provides an effective way for teams to obtain high levels of automation and do so within the Sprint that they are working in.  A common mistake of newer Agile teams is to develop in one sprint and test in the next and sometimes automate in the third.  Using BDD automation tools such as Cucumber with well written acceptance criteria (I'll provide examples of well written BDD in my next blog post)
A third benefit of BDD is that a Scrum Team builds a clear understanding of the scope of the story.  Since everyone participates in the development of the acceptance criteria, if a scenario is missed, it's a shared miss - No finger pointing, just manage the new scope with a new story and prioritize it in the backlog.
I've helped a number of organizations implement BDD effectively,  one of which did not have any automation at all.  The use of BDD acceptance criteria writing almost immediately improved the understanding of the features being developed and helped my QA team write significantly more test cases than they had been doing.  This effort led to a measurable improvement in Quality even before we added the automation suite later.
Having come from a waterfall world many years ago I can tell you that when you 'get' BDD,  it changes the way that you look at requirements and provides you with a mental framework that you can quickly use to model what is going to be built.
After a few months of using this format at Disney the Product Owners were uniform in their agreement that there simply was no other way that they would want to work with their teams.
Automation IS our goal, but it is not what defines BDD.

Being Agile - Say it, Do it, Prove it

I was working with a team recently and as we talked about all of the planning that Agile entails, I broke it down into very simple terms - Say it , Do it , Prove it. That is really what Agile is about.  Anything else outside of these three concepts is noise to your ability to deliver product and services to internal and external customers.  As Product Owners in an Agile organization, you need to understand all of the effort and dynamics involved in getting your teams to Say it, Do it, Prove it.



  1. Say it = Release Planning and Backlog Grooming -
  2. Do it = Sprint execution 
  3. Prove it = Retrospective

It sounds really simple when broken down into these 3 basics phrases.  The truth is that 'Being Agile' is much more involved than simply 'Doing Agile'.


Building great products

A long time ago I left college with the notion that I wanted to ultimately run my own business, my job experiences were purposefully diverse, giving me experience in Sales, Banking, Management and ultimately IT and luckily I've been able to do that several times. While I wasn't always engaged in the world of technology during some of its growth, I've always been involved in building and delivering great product.

What I learned during this time is that building great products is much like writing a symphony, you have many instruments that you can choose from for your piece, but if you don't bring them together in the right way, if you don't understand the limitations of those instruments you don't end up with a masterpiece, but rather something that might sound like noise.

I have often used the concept of a symphony as an example for the way that we manage software project delivery.  You have an individual, Conductor, who is responsible for ensuring that everyone in the symphony is playing their parts correctly, are watching the conductor for queues on changes that might be made in the middle of the concert.  When everything comes together correctly you get beautiful music, when it doesn't.....not so nice.  Building software in an Agile world is much like this, the Conductor is the Product Owner and the delivery teams are the musicians who watch the conductor for their queues when small changes are made in the delivery.

Understanding your craft, be it song writing, engineering, sales, an important element of you becoming great at what you do.  The craft of building great products is being able to master how to manage all of these different crafts in order to bring about something great.  My wife, who is an Arts Manager, has often likened software development as just as much as artists realm as an engineering one.  I have another post I'm writing that explores this in more depth.

For those of us who build a product with software we define our vision, much like a composer will do.  Once the vision is identified then we determine what components (or instruments) we will need to accomplish our vision.

What are the types of instruments that we use build product with software?

  1. Product Owners/Managers
  2. Product Developers
  3. Product Testers
  4. Software - Java, .Net, etc...
  5. Hardware - Servers, Databases, etc..

What is our endgame with these ingredients?  Build product with software that delivers functionality that customers want and are willing to pay for.  If our instruments aren't aligned with this primary goal, we'll waste time and money and deliver quality that isn't what the customer expected.

When we talk about quality in the software world, we talk about defects, code quality, etc..., however from a holistic standpoint none of this matters if you haven't delivered a product that people want.  Your first goal as a Product Development team is to understand and align yourself to this completely.  If you focus more on delivering technical quality then you aren't delivering the quality that the customer is expecting. Using the example of a restaurant, I can cook and deliver the absolutely best Pasta Primavera to you, but if in fact you wanted a Steak, then I have missed your quality expectations.  It doesn't matter how good the food was, how well it was delivered, it failed to meet your expectations so the entire element of how you perceive the quality of my business is affected.

I think we are moving towards understanding this with concepts such as Personas, however I'll be honest I've been in only one place  where we paid attention to these personas as we built our product,  I think many of our high-tech companies that have evolved over the past 10 years are much more focused on the technical aspects of the product over what the customer wants.  Example?  Facebook, Google.  They release new features and then gauge response and then remove or modify the product features based upon feedback.   I think long-term this is not the paradigm that will bring success to most organizations, eventually you need to be driving your company based upon what your customers want, not what seems cool and technically challenging.

Building great product has absolutely nothing to do with technology.  Technology is merely the enabler of a product that customers want and are willing to pay for.   If we could find a different way to deliver the product without technology (or at least the technology we have in place today) we would do that in a heartbeat.

If we are to re-align our instruments as a technology team delivering quality what would they look like?

  1. A clear understanding of what the customer wants, ensuring that whatever we work on is aligned to that need.
  2. A clear set of requirements that support that need.  Agile provides a process for capturing user needs with User Stories, however the key miss I see with most user stories is that they aren't written to align to the customer need.
  3. A set of software specifications that support the User driven stories.
    1.  What do we mean specifications? Using tools and processes such as TDD and BDD to define the user story at the technical level.  Again another big miss I see with teams who write user stories is their acceptance criteria stays too high level to understand the technical elements we need to delivery as part of our technical quality.
    2. Though Agile is about conversations over documentation, we really can't deliver high quality software unless we build a shared understanding of the user stories and a depth of understanding via specifications.
  4. A feedback loop that delivers customer feedback to everything we do.

Notice, in the new set of instruments there is no mention of technology, how you deliver a feature is entirely up to the technologists.  Their responsibility is to deliver customer features, the expectation as professionals is that they will do it with quality.

Delivering great products comes from the intersection of  customer needs and high quality technology.  Great product can survive from lack of technical quality in the short team but it can never survive the lack of focus on features driven by the customer.

Agile Certifications - Why they aren't neccessary

Agile started many years ago with some basic (note I do not say simple) concepts related to how we should work together to build better software products.  Though I struggle with the notion that mere communication among individuals can deliver quality software, it can provide a product that is closer in alignment with the product owner's vision. I remember as Agile unfolded there was a debate on whether we needed things such as certifications.  I recall the argument that the very process of creating certifications for things such as Scrum would defeat the very benefits that the Agile manifesto was attempting to address.

Now many years into the manifesto I have to say that these certifications have brought an element of rigor that 'can' be beneficial but I think often stifle the creativity that can come out of Agile teamwork.  Certifications do not make you a great Scrum Master nor a Product Owner, they merely convey that you have taken a 1-2 day class that has provided you with the  evolved standards that Scrum has been defined to be.

I've been involved in a number of Agile transformations along with working in already high performing agile organizations and none of them are alike.  One thing I have taken  away is that teams who are provided space to try new things often find creative ways to solve the unique challenges they face.

As someone who started in Agile from the project management perspective I quickly realized that I was not your standard project manager who managed against a project plan, happily disconnected from my team.  No I was always learning, asking questions, it is how I went from a project manager into QA, because I took an active role in being in helping my team deliver great software.  Through out it all I was most focused on getting feedback from my team in order to improve our processes.

In those early days there were no certifications, we just took the concepts and did what worked and continued to evaluate how and what we did.  With certifications there is almost a cookie cutter approach to engaging Agile that I don't believe was the intent of the original writers of the manifesto.

Scrum and the processes it provides are extremely important, I'm not saying that these don't bring value.  What I am saying is that you don't need certifications in order to be good at Agile and Scrum.

I always tell my teams, Agile isn't easy, it will highlight every weakness in your delivery process and force you to ask hard questions about how much the organization is committed to changing the way they deliver a product.  Having a Scrum Master or Product Owner certification does not help in these situations.  What does help is working with an experienced Agile coach who has been in the trenches, who is experienced in the demands that Agile and the transformation present.

As an organization looking to adopt Agile, getting certifications for your team is not a requirement to working the concepts that so many teams use to be successful in Agile.  Don't let certifying your team be a precursor to moving toward Agile.  At one organization I worked at we took this approach and ultimately it wasn't necessary as the majority of the people who were 'certified' were not involved in working in daily Scrum team activities.

An experienced coach will be able to guide you through how to work as a team, manage communication and change the way that you deliver software products and your organization.

And yes I have several certifications including CPO and CSM and know that these are now almost standard requirements for anyone wanting to work in an Agile environment However if you are just starting Agile don't assume that someone who has been certified is necessarily an experienced practioner.  When looking for help in adopting Agile you should look for someone who has been involved in more than 5 different Agile implementations or organizations, perspective is worth it's weight in gold.

Product Discovery - Uncover your backlog in Agile

Much of the writing and learning that you gain about Agile focuses on the day to day nuts and bolts part of execution, however I think that teams are missing a much greater opportunity to improve the quality of both execution and delivery if they spent more time developing their backlog. My teams consistently hear me talk about getting contextually rich user stories  as part being able to delivery quickly and with high quality.

In order to get to the point that we have contextually rich user stories teams need to spend some dedicated time building out their product backlog.

Whether you are developing an entirely new product or simply adding features to your existing product, taking the time to fully investigate and build out your User Story backlog is important.

Much is said about doing just enough documentation to get the job done, but what I've seen over the years is that teams that fail to build out user stories that have a specific set of information in them will spend more time trying to figure out what they are doing IN the sprint which negatively impacts quality and the teams velocity.

There is nothing wrong with spending time before a set of sprints building a strong understanding of what the team is going to do.

You wouldn't try to build a house without a certain level of planning ahead of time.  Agile teams often arrive at the start of their Sprints with nothing more than a set of ideas.  If builders showed up at a job site to start building your home with only a rough idea of what you wanted, they couldn't go very quickly nor would they build something of quality that met your needs and expectations.  You might get what you want, but probably not.

Agile teams need to take this approach a bit more, spending time with their Product Managers to not just flush out the features that are wanted, but more importantly the lower level details needed to provide the team an ability to plan more effectively and deliver high quality products.

If a builder shows  up and wanted to pour a basement, they need to know more than that.  They need to know the size of the basement (ie how much concrete do I need) , if the site has been prepared, has drainage been considered, etc.... Building anything of quality requires planning before you can deliver.

Agile I think too often believes that you can go lite on the planning and still delivery quality.  If you think that refactoring is the golden ticket for lack of planning, it's not.  Rarely do teams have time to do the amount of refactoring they require to keep their applications clean and scalable.  This leads to applications that grow in complexity requiring even more time to add features, all the while thinking that we can go lite on planning.

As you consider Agile as a development process, don't forget that Product Discovery is an important element of delivering high quality product quickly.

Agile, Change and the things we can do

We home school our children and a few years ago my wife decided to utilize stories and a Kanban board to manage the kids work flow every day. Doing this provided her the ability to build a backlog of work tasks that our children were going to work on (no we didn't have them perform estimations or commitments :) )  Each day she puts up the work that they need to complete in the Not Started column and then the kids can decide which ones that they want to work on and pull the ticket into the In Progress column.

Once they are done with a ticket my wife reviews the work and if accepted moves the ticket to Accepted.  This approach provided our kids with some level of control over their work flow and also an understanding that they weren't done until Mom signed off on their work.  This way of managing their work provide them visibility to how much is left for the day and more importantly the topics that cause them more trouble.

Now that my daughter is working on her first business/website (she's 13) we are using an Agile Discovery process where we are building a User Story backlog (she's learning VOC) and developing low-fi wireframes (she's learning design) for her website where she will be selling her customized jewelry made out of recycled products, photography of the animals she has seen across the country and raising awareness of animal conservation.  She's now comfortable with an Agile process because we laid the groundwork during school.  I think in many ways teachers could utilize this process which would provide visibility to high performing individuals and those that are struggling.  Taking a page from Scrum perhaps the high performing individuals can provide support to the ones that may be struggling, just like we would expect our Scrum teams to do when someone is struggling with a particularly gnarly code problem.

Agile is most commonly associated with Software Development, but really the iterative continuous improvement concepts apply to anything you want to focus on.

Agile can be applied to changing your habits.  For example if you want to lose weight, write an Epic stating that value of losing weight, then write several thematic user stories with your intermediate goals and then write stories for your sprints with specific activities you need to accomplish (exercise, etc...) put it on the wall for your Kanban tracking.  If necessary have a standup with people who are supporting you so you can report on your progress, impediments (Ben and Jerry's is right next to my office...)

An underlying principle of Agile is the need to change behavior, not just of the teams building your product but those that want them built.  You can't have a smooth running organization if you don't address the intrinsic  behavior of people in general.  Agile can provide the framework for helping make this change by providing a shared language.

When we work in an organization we may think we are all working towards an end goal (ie making great products, making money, etc...) but as soon as an organization begins to grow people who don't know each other and who may have no shared experiences need to start communicating.

I recently completed McCarthy's Core Protocol training  and one of the things I came away from it was that getting people to have a shared framework of communication is the most important thing that high performing teams and organizations should focus on, the rest will come as a result of this effort.  If you deliver this you deliver the ability for these teams to produce great product anywhere/anytime.

Think about it this way - We are all organic systems, who behave based upon the experiences that we take in over our life time.  Since no two humans are organically the same ( not even your own family) we end up with an ineffective communication driven by our life experiences and trained responses.

Core Protocols and in my mind Agile, provide a framework to establish a common language, just as we do with disparate technical systems (isn't that what a service based architecture is all about?), we write code that provides a common communication protocol between them, removing the impediment their different languages pose to having them communication effectively.

As you begin to start to adopt Agile understand that though the practices you read about, such a Release Planning, etc... are extremely important, the need to provide your teams and organizations a shared communication framework are equally important to long-term success.

Sound Agile - Aligning Agile with Soundness

As I indicated in my last post I renamed my blog to Sound Agile and I'll be writing about Agile from the perspective of Soundness and how organizations should be evaluating their Agile adoption. I spent quite a bit of time trying to decide what I wanted to name my consulting business and blog (both are called Sound Agile) and I ultimately wanted to convey what I have seen as successful with respect to the teams and organizations I have worked with over the past 10 years.

Thanks to my wife for providing me a word that when I looked at it provided me with the right context to what I had been trying to convey.





a. Free from Defect - Speaks to Quality that we strive for in Agile. b. Healthy - Speaks to your employees health and well-being c. Robust - Speaks to building scalable products. d. Sound Mind - Speaks to teams keeping a clear and open mind to improve


Supporting Manifesto - Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

a. Sound business/investment - Speaks to the value proposition that Agile focuses on. b. Financially strong, secure and reliable - Speaks to the ability of Agile teams to delivery products that are foundational to your organizations long term health and security.

3. Competent, sensible, or valid: sound judgment - This speaks to trusting that the people that you are hire are compentent and when following Agile ceremonies such as Standups, Retrospectives and Planning are able to deliver product that is built on solid decisions.

4. Having no defect as to truth, justice, wisdom, or reason: sound advice. - This speaks to the continuous improvement and Retrospectives that drive this effort.

5. Of substantial or enduring character: sound moral values - Speaks to team commitments, believing and supporting themselves, the foundation of Scrum.

We spend so much time writing and talking about things that we should, could, might do to deliver Agile,  We hear people talk about how 'Agile' are you, tell people that doesn't 'Sound Agile' and I think we have muddied the waters of what Agile should be.

When you hear Sound Agile you may be inclined to add an additional adjective 'Sounds Like Agile' and to some degree that is expected.  My focus however will be on the soundness of Agile from the perspective of organizational change an area that isn't really talked about as much as the other elements of day to day Scrum.

I look forward to comments and input to my blog as my writings will form the basis for the types of coaching and consulting I hope to do in the future.

New Blog Name - Sound Agile

As you may have noticed I updated the name on my blog to better reflect where I am going with content and my overall beliefs about what sound Agile practices should be. Sound Agile is derived from the attributes of sound:




3. competent, sensible, or valid: sound judgment.


5. of substantial or enduring character: sound moral values.



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