The Mountain Goat Software Blog

I've been playing a fair amount of Go lately. If you're not familiar with Go, it's a strategy game that originated in China 2,500 years ago. It's along the lines of chess, but it's about making territory with black and white pieces played on the intersections of a grid of 19x19 lines. Like Scrum, there are very few rules in Go. Also like Scrum, there are a fair number of principles,...

When writing user stories there are, of course, two parts: user and story. The user is embedded right at the front of stories when using the most common form of writing user stories: As a I so that. Many of the user roles in a system can be considered first class users. These are the roles that...

Yes, I really did refer to guitarist Alvin Lee in a Certified Scrum Product Owner class last week. Here's why. I was making a point that Scrum teams should strive to go as fast as they can without going so fast they spin out of control. Alvin Lee of the band Ten Years After was a talented guitarist known for his very fast solos. Lee's ultimate performance was of the song...

Participants in my Certified ScrumMaster courses are often surprised when I recommend that programmers participate in story-writing workshops. After all, a story-writing workshop is a meeting targeted at determining the functionality to be built next. I like to do story-writing workshops about quarterly to focus on bigger initiatives. But some projects will do story writing every sprint. Regardless of how often these meetings occur, I think it's vital that programmers, testers, database engineers,...

I recommend using Planning Poker on product backlog items rather than on the tasks that make up a sprint backlog.

I'm a child of the '60s, but only in the literal sense. I was born in…

Vision and Backlog Scrum is a great framework for building a product with the right features. It encourages the use of a vision shared by the product owner, the ScrumMaster, the development team, and the stakeholders, and it provides a product backlog that allows the team to move towards the vision by creating

All of a Scrum team’s members should be present when playing Planning Poker. You may be tempted to estimate without the individuals in some role—don’t.

To see how this applies to an agile project, consider the issue of whether a team should earn velocity credit for fixing bugs during a sprint. A team that uses velocity to measure how much functionality is delivered in a sprint will not claim credit for bug fixes. No new functionality...

During sprint reviews, teams are supposed to demonstrate only those product backlog items that are done. But there is one time a team might consider breaking this rule. Discover when and why that is.

I recently helped to facilitate a two-day planning session for an important initiative at Adobe that would require coordination across several component teams in multiple locations. Going in, my agile compromise-o-meter...

Many of the challenges in agile and Scrum stem from the idea of the self-organizing team. Of course, many (perhaps most) of the benefits are also the result of self-organizing teams. One of the questions I get from many leaders is whether it's OK...