In her book The Great ScrumMaster, author Zuzana Šochová reminds us that we may have lost our way in understanding the role of the ScrumMaster in agile. She describes the role using the #ScrumMasterWay concept which, according to the author, finally provides ScrumMasters the answer to their most common question: “What will the ScrumMaster do…
Bitcoin and blockchain may be somewhat off-topic for this blog, but summertime is always a good time for me to pick up off-topic books to read during my vacation. With the current cryptocurrency craze it was unavoidable that I should pick up a book on the topic. Although I was previously vaguely familiar with Bitcoin…
The book Lean Analytics by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz builds on the Lean Startup movement. The authors say that we live in a digital world, and we can build something on the cheap, measure its effect, and learn from it to build something better next time. Lean Analytics is used to measure the progress,…
Whenever I hear that someone refers to PMP or PMI as a methodology, I want to tell them that neither of these is a project management methodology (PMP is a certification and PMI is the name of the organization that issues the certification). The Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) is also not a methodology…
Chances are that when you started learning MapReduce, the first example that was covered was counting how many times a word appears in a given text or set of texts. This example is sometimes referred to as the “Hello, world!” of MapReduce. The example is straightforward enough and it explains how MapReduce works nicely. But…
There are various opinions on mixing agile and waterfall. On one hand, there are strong arguments against mixing agile and waterfall, for example the term scrummerfall was coined to denote a combination of the two approaches and defined as “the practice of combining Scrum and Waterfall so as to ensure failure at a much faster…
Agile methodologies typically focus on software development. It may appear as if writing code is the only aspect of agile delivery. But we know that most applications use data and this data must be stored somewhere, preferably in a database. This is an integral part of any application. The question then becomes: how do we develop…
For those of us who started our careers as traditional project managers, transforming into a Scrum Master role is an arduous journey. To be truly agile, we must surrender being the one who is in command and control. Our new role is to be coach and facilitator, teacher and observer. This is easier said than…
The book Data Smart: Using Data Science to Transform Information into Insight by John W. Foreman is one of those fantastic books that upon reading it I kept on asking myself why I haven’t come across it sooner. The author makes everything about data science appear less mysterious and so much clearer. On the one hand,…
PMI continues with its annual publishing of extensions to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK). This year they finally published the long awaited Software Extension to the PMBOK Guide Fifth Edition. The extension includes widely accepted practices in managing software projects. The structure of the software extension is the same as the structure of…