Agile Racecar: Software, Magic, and Life

Agile tool Rally has a "split" feature it recommends to handle "unfinished work" in a Scrum Sprint: Manage Unfinished Work - Split user stories ( new link ) Below are my observations on the "Split" feature in Rally (followed by a few excellent articles on Splitting User Stories):   This "split" feature in Rally has numerous problems: 1. Nothing to do with Splitting User Stories It has nothing to do with "Splitting a User Story" which is an advanced but fairly well-understood field in Agile, and a tool for Product Managers to use in one of the two scenarios: The Product Manager does it before an Iteration commences (i.e. during backlog creation or release planning) to create User Stories by business value that are right-sized, i.e. they can be comfortably implemented inside an iteration; The Product Manager does it in Iteration Planning or in the middle of an Iteration to reduce scope by removing/simplifying accept...

I just came across a very good article on achieving Agile proficiency . True Agile proficiency requires a radically different way of managing Projects, Engineering, Products, & Organizations. Agile methods sometimes get a bad rap ironically because of the huge growth in their popularity and adoption. To meet the demand, a lot of organizations hire "Agile Coaches" and "certified" practitioners who are recycled Consultants & Project Managers from the world of waterfall and PMP and have merely re-branded themselves instead of truly reinventing themselves.

The following are my initial thoughts on "The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries - before I had read the book. I have read the book since then, and will post a detailed review later. I'm the founder of Agile Entrepreneurs. I started Agile Entrepreneurs in 2006 to share my lessons -failures more than successes, but also successes built upon those failures - with my fellow bootstrapping entrepreneurs. We had a few initial hiccups, we really got going in 2007, and over the next several years, nearly every Friday evening I sat in a room with a variety of entrepreneurs with only one thing in common - they were all bootstrapping founders of hi-tech startups building products. None of them had anything more than a polite interest in each others' companies, but they were all bound by empathy for each other - they were bound by our motto: "Make Your Own Mistakes, Learn From Mine". I had - and have - plenty of lessons to share, the two most fundamental of them be...