Guest Post by Jurgen Appelo:

I once read that “managing is harder than programming, because making people do what is needed is far more difficult than making computers do what is needed”. (Don’t flame me if you don’t agree. I’m quoting from an unknown source here.)

This quote kept running through my mind when I recently encountered a number of, well… let’s call them disciplinary challenges, like…  Read the rest of this post

• Not being at a meeting, without notice, despite having accepted the request,
• Not keeping systems or task boards up-to-date with latest task/story statuses,

In the 1950′s, Solomon Asch, conducted a series of experiments designed to understand the phenomenon we know as conformity. In his experiments, a group of participants were seated around a table and asked to examine a series of vertical lines. They were then asked to tell the group which vertical line, A, B, or C, matched the test line. The vertical line series looked very similar to these:

 Read the rest of this post

A question I field frequently is “When should we start and end our iterations?” For a long time, I worked on teams that started our iterations on Monday and ended them two weeks later on Friday. We did our planning meetings on Mondays, and our review, demo and retrospectives on Fridays. But, the more I think about it, the more I’m now inclined to answer that the best iteration start and end dates are midweek.  Read the rest of this post

In the past few weeks I’ve been asked about and have been considering exactly how to fit QA and testing into a two week iteration. A primary concern of the folks I’ve been talking with is that QA’s and testers on an agile team have nothing to do at the start of an iteration. The second concern is that we can’t keep writing new code up until the last minute of an iteration if QA is to adequately test the code, and as such, what do the developers do at the end of the iteration. Of course, the underlying concern in both of these cases is keeping the QA’s and the devlopers effectively utilized during an iteration. Software quality always seems to boil down to a utilization/cost equation doesn’t it? Well, after giving it some thought, I think I’ve come with a basic schedule for QA’s and developers over a two week iteration. Here’s the plan:  Read the rest of this post