How to break your Product Owner

Following these steps you can not only crush all loyalty, optimism, and quality in your Product Owner, but you can make him tear the very hair from his scalp:

Make a business decision without consulting the partners in the business.
Find a buffoon who has never heard of Agile and make him Project Manager.
Task the Project Manager [...]

Developers who want to combine stories

… Stop it.

SCRAM, not Scrum, v.2

I have already tried to describe a methodology called SCRAM, but now revising it makes sense. Things have been learnt.
Scrum has Sprints, Scram has Scrambles. We scramble and push and do everything we can do deploy new functionality every day.
Humans and animals move fastest when running from something, not when running towards something.
In the case [...]

Handling degrading developers

Something else I need to write about. Developers who get worse over the years. How do you handle them?
Firstly I should define what I mean by ‘worse’. Well, essentially:

Quality of code decreases
Ability to estimate tasks decreases
Attention to detail decreases
Time distracted increases
Work done fails testing more frequently
Contribution during discussions decreases

I suppose the first step in handling [...]

Where SCRUM goes wrong

So, I have been thinking. Scrum is an excellent methodology, without doubt. It’s perhaps not suitable for all software development projects, but I reckon that a majority would benefit from adopting scrum.
Yet scrum has weaknesses.
I can talk about what I have perceived from being involved in Scrum for eleven months as a product owner. I [...]

The future of software development

As we become faster, more agile, and better organised thanks to Scrum, one can only try to imagine where we’ll be in another 20 years, in terms of software development.
I think we’ll be seeing more web-based applications, games, and Java developments, and less of the standalone desktop type software being created. This seems to be [...]