Monthly News from Mike Cohn and Mountain Goat Software

Is this email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. 5 December 2012 I love books! It's probably one of the reasons I started writing myself. I always thought that if I ever had the time and money I would love to collect famous first editions of books. But I went to lunch last week and forgot to bring my iPad to the office, so I took a printed book to read over lunch. When I opened it, I realized just how long it had been since I'd read something on paper. Part of it is my travel schedule, but I rarely read printed books any more; eBooks are just so much more convenient. Sitting at lunch with a physical book instead of my iPad reminded me of the old comedian W. C. Fields. Fields, a legendary drinker, once quipped, "During one of my treks through Afghanistan, we lost our corkscrew. We were compelled to live on food and water for several days." These days that could just as easily be, "I lost my iPad [or Kindle] and was compelled to read printed books for several days." Not quite as dramatic as the proliferation of eBooks has been the growing popularity of audio books. I know that I listen to more audio books in my car than I do music, even though I often feel like I can't live without music. (I'm listening to The Gaslight Anthem's Handwritten CD right now.) Each of my agile and Scrum books has been available on the Kindle for quite awhile. I'm happy, though, this month to announce the availability of the "Leading a Self-Organizing Team" chapter from Succeeding with Agile as a free audio download. The photo above shows the recording booth we've put into one of the offices here at Mountain Goat Software. I used it for this audio chapter as well as our Agile Estimating and Planning video course.  Since the audio chapter is from the Succeeding with Agile book, I've included a couple of links below to blog posts that are based on that book as well. Regards, Mike Cohn   Separate Estimating from Committing A fundamental and common problem in many organizations is that estimates and commitments are considered equivalent. A development team (agile or not) estimates that delivering a desired set of capabilities will take seven months with the available resources. Team members provide this estimate to their manager who passes the estimate along to a vice president who... Read more... Mix the Sizes of the Product Backlog Items You Commit To Teams used to a sequential development process have become accustomed to hand-offs between specialists. Analysts hand their work to designers who hand it to programmers who pass it on to testers. Each of these hand-offs includes some overhead in the form of meetings, documents to read and perhaps sign, and so on. In part because of this overhead... Read more... Mike Cohn of Mountain Goat Software has Certified ScrumMaster, Certified Scrum Product Owner, Succeeding with Agile, Effective User Stories and Agile Estimating & Planning courses scheduled in Boulder, Copenhagen, Dallas, London, Orange County, Oslo, San Diego, and Silicon Valley.

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