The Mountain Goat Software Blog

A common question I get is how can a product owner (or team) be sure they've thought...

One of my favorite movie scenes comes in The Untouchables when mobster Al Capone (played by Robert DeNiro) says,...

In a recent interview for an upcoming agile book by Sondra Ashmore and Kristin Runyan, they…

Even if you've taken the often stated agile stance of getting rid of periodic performance reviews in your organization, it can still be helpful to provide people with some commentary on how their work is perceived by others in the organization.

I occasionally encounter the use of t-shirt sizes (Small, Medium, Large, or so on) in use as estimating units by teams. T-shirt sizes are an OK approach to getting started with relative estimating, but they suffer from two severe weaknesses:...

It is sometimes beneficial to write stories for someone other than the user.

A Scrum trainer recently asked for a couple of good, real examples of large user stories (epics) being split into smaller stories. I thought it would be useful to share those examples here as well since the companies where these came from gave me permission to share them.

Ahh, it's fall. Not only does it bring the return of great, cooler weather but it...

An organization's Wise Architects often provide requirements to a team in the form of non-functional requirements.

Story points on an agile product backlog represent the effort to implement the backlog item.

Planning is the act of thinking about the future. Sometimes that future holds risk and uncertainty. In those cases we plan more than when the future is highly predictable as a hundredth visit to your childhood home town would be.

Agile does not at all require individuals to be generalists, but individuals are expected to work together as a team.