The Mountain Goat Software Blog

The One-Handed Clock is a useful visual metaphor that can be hung in a team room.

The ideal situation is to put the bugs right onto the product backlog.

Discover whether agile teams should work on one product backlog item at a time or if it's OK for Scrum teams to work on multiple items. Mike Cohn's answer might surprise you.

Most teams do the daily scrum per person, but some encounter the problem described here and discuss things story-by-story. Not all teams need to do it the same.

As a measure of the amount of work completed in an iteration, velocity works extremely well when teams are relatively stable.

Some teams may respond to the pressure for their abstract measure of velocity to increase by gradually inflating the number of story points assigned to a story.

A common criticism of story points is that the meaning of a story point will differ among teams.

By producing a single chart that shows both a team's rate of progress and the product backlog, we have a single visualization that shows both when a team is likely to finish and what features will be in the product by that time.

*In seeking to improve how we develop software, we continually inspect and adapt. While thinking recently…

Sprint planning meetings typically go into deeper detail than is appropriate for product backlog item estimating (whether in story points or ideal days).

I was asked recently how to go about writing user stories for a back-end financial system. This is an interesting example and is a question I get asked a lot, so I thought I should answer it here. This example brings up a couple of key interesting challenges:

Write Product Backlog Items Just In Time And Just Enough How much detail should be in…