Agile … is an attitude, not a technique with boundaries. An attitude has no boundaries, so we wouldn’t ask “can I use agile here”, but rather “how would I act in the agile way here?” or “how agile can we be, here?” Alistair Cockburn.
The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then start on the first one.
Scrum is like your mother-in-law, it points out ALL your faults. Ken Schwaber.
As an Agile coach, you don’t need to have all the answers; it takes time and a few experiments to hit on the right approach. Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley.
We don’t need an accurate document. We need a shared understanding. Jeff Patton.
The important thing is not your process. The important thing is your process for improving your process. Henrik Kniberg.
It seems that perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
The goal is NOT to write code. If we could ship products and make all this money without writing any code, we would. Your job is to ship products EXACTLY on time. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a developer, tester, program manager, product manager whatever. Everybody’s job is the same. Chris Peters, former Microsoft program manager.
Multitasking Makes You Stupid. Doing more than one thing at a time makes you slower and worse at both tasks. Don’t do it. If you think this doesn’t apply to you, you’re wrong—it does. Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time.
Listen, really listen to people who disagree with you in order to fight confirmation bias. Linda Rising.
>My advice is to stop emphasizing the process frameworks and start focusing on the company culture and mindsets. Selena Delesie.
Rather than say “requirements”, say “deciding what to build”. The verb phrase works, the noun phrase doesn’t. Alistair Cockburn.
Trying to speed project schedule by reducing testing is like trying to lose weight by donating blood. Klaus Leopold.
Software development is not a rational process. It’s a process made by people with feelings with bodies and with thinking. And by putting all those together I can be a more effective software developer. Kent Beck.
If you adopt only one agile practice, let it be retrospectives. Everything else will follow. Woody Zuill.
Big egos have little ears. Robert Schuller.
In any given moment we have two options: to step forward into growth or to step back into safety. Abraham Maslow.
Three bloody roles, Scrum has, and only three. If you can’t get that right, don’t call it Scrum, OK? Ron Jeffries.
If we have a fully defined backlog, we no longer have a true Agile Product Development situation. Instead, we have a project. Ron Jeffries.
Any Scrum without working product at the end of a sprint is a failed Scrum. Jeff Sutherland.
A sprint would only be a failure if the team didn’t deliver anything and didn’t learn from it. Mike Cohn.
Remember: it’s not the documentation that needs to be kept in sync, but the people. George Dinwiddie.
No Heroics. If you need a hero to get things done, you have a problem. Heroic effort should be viewed as a failure of planning. Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time.