1. Mike Cohn - Mountain Goat Software

One of the founders of agile, Mike speaks with authority on a number of agile subjects. His focus is slightly more towards the product/project side with less focus on engineering practices.

1. Use the same deployment mechanism for all environments

When you do something often, you get good at it. So deploy to all environments using the same mechanism. That way, when you deploy to production things less likely to go wrong.

It has long been a tradition in waterfall style projects to associate long hours with increased productivity. A recurring pattern is up-front planning, followed by realisation that a deadline is not going to be achieved and then finally a push to increase working hours.

When we talk about non-functional requirements we often focus on performance and response times. But there are many other types of non-functional requirements and their obscurity can lead to them being missed.

Here are some non-functional requirements that can get forgotten:

Nothing else in Scrum generates more confusion than story points. So what are they and just as importantly, what are they not? Here is my definition:

Story points represent the relative difficulty in completing development tasks that produce business value

...there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know.

- Donald Rumsfeld US Secretary of Defense

The showcase is a critical part of Scrum. It is a window in to the project for the business users and will often determine their attitude and approach to the Scrum team. Done badly, a showcase will alienate stakeholders and disrupt the team's progress.

Too many developers hated planning because the plan had never been of any personal benefit to them. Instead, plans were often used as weapons used against the developers

- Succeeding with Agile, Mike Cohn

Nothing kills the productivity of a development team more than working on and supporting poor quality legacy code.

You start work in a new team, full of grand ideas and determined to do things the right way. Then you discover the morass of existing software that is sitting at the heart of the system. This code has been around for years. Nobody likes it, everyone wants to get rid of it. But that would mean spending lots of time and resource and producing little, if any, business value.

The Daily Scrum is one of the Scrum ceremonies. It is also often called the daily stand-up or just the stand-up.

What is a stand-up?

The idea in holding a daily stand-up is to get the Scrum Team members talking to each other. The stand-up is there to coordinate dependencies, to identify issues and to fascilitate team members helping each other out.