The answer to that question according to the Scrum Alliance is: An agile coach helps individuals, teams, and entire enterprises embrace a culture shift based on proven human-centric agile principles, practices, and values. This culture shift helps people and organizations continue to thrive in the ever-changing world of work. That sounds good to me, so let’s dig a bit deeper into what is the actual work that an agile coach does in order to help individuals, teams and entire enterprises. Does an agile coach actually coach? To answer that you need to find out what it actually takes to embrace a culture shift based on proven human-centric agile principles, practices, and values. Obviously an agile coach needs to convey values …

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Your technical debt is product debt and product debt is business debt! Start giving your technical debt the attention it deserves or it will punish you later. Technical debt is business debt, the funds are just not borrowed from a bank but taken from engineers. This sounds provokative? Read further because tech debt is business debt! What is technical debt? The term was coined by Ward Cunningham, who said “If we failed to make our program align with what we then understood to be the proper way to think about our financial objects, then we were going to continue to stumble on that disagreement which is like paying interest on a loan.”. Further he added “Shipping first-time code is like …

Pay back time… tech debt is business debt! Read more »

Measuring and using velocity of an agile team can be helpful in forecasting output of the near future. You need a certain stability in your team and enough data points / iterations. However, there are also things that could go wrong using velocity. Therefore I want to shed some light on pitfalls using velocity in agile planning. Velocity is not a measure for productivity! Velocity is only an indicator of how much work was done in the past, not how much work will be done in the future. It’s like measuring your running speed with a stopwatch and then using this value to predict how fast you can run tomorrow or next week. We would be able to predict who will …

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