The customer usually wants to see a plan as early as possible - it’s a reasonable request and its perfectly ok to do this providing the communication of the plan and its risks is carefully articulated and the pros and cons of the method are clearly understood by all. The key to mitigating the cons coming into play is to have a poker game with the senior management from both the customer and supplier.   more »

Satisfaction criteria certainly must be agreed between customer and supplier but should that agreement extend to the detail of test scenarios and scripts?   more »

Clients who want to be confident about a schedule to deliver an agreed set of functionality on time and within budget will benefit from the development team implementing standard deviation buffers...   more »

When a developer recieves a brief that isn't detailed enough its no surprise - we can't necessarily expect the business to fully understand how to articulate its requirements to a technical team. But when the business suddenly realises there's an important detail they didn't mention before just when the developer is proudly admiring his wonderful work on the last day of build - you can't deny him is startled expression. Especially as its communicated as "I have an urgent business critical change that must be delivered on the planned deployment date come what may."   more »

In Mike Cohn's book Agile Estimating and Planning there is a chapter entitled "Why Planning Fails" which cites estimates becoming commitments as one key reason for this...   more »

PlanningPoker.com is a fantastic way to play planning poker with distributed teams...   more »

Planning Poker requires the teams full attention, dedication, preparation and most of all time...   more »

Is there such a thing as the opposite of SCRUM? And can it work? ...   more »

I'm introducing mcLEAN as a new blog focused on real life experiences, good and bad, of implementing lean and aglie ...   more »