Mike Cohn's Blog – Succeeding With Agile

• Agile Requirements Gathering: Three Types of Requirements March 27, 2023
  Deadlines are often missed because teams fail to consider emergent requirements. Learn about the 3 types of requirements your agile team should be gathering.
• Why I Don’t Emphasize Sprint Goals March 21, 2023
  Sprint goals are considered a mandatory part of Scrum. Here’s why I disagree.  
• User Stories: How to Create Story Maps March 14, 2023
  Story maps help to create a shared understanding of the product, visualize user needs, and elicit user story ideas. Discover how to create your own.
• How to Run a Successful User Story Writing Workshop February 28, 2023
  What you need to know to conduct a story-writing workshop with your team.
• What Is Cross-Functional Collaboration in Agile? February 14, 2023
  Perhaps the most prevalent and persistent myth in agile is that a cross-functional team is one on which each person possesses every skill necessary to complete the work. This is simply not true. A cross-functional team has members with a variety of skills, but that does not mean each member has all of the skills.
• Be a Great Product Owner: Six Things Teams and Scrum Masters Need January 31, 2023
  Learn six ways effective product owners ensure their teams’ success.
• What Happens When During a Sprint January 3, 2023
  Succeeding with Scrum is easier when you know when and why to conduct each of the Scrum events during the sprint.
• What Are Agile Story Points? December 6, 2022
  Story points are perhaps the most misunderstood topic in agile. Story points are not based on just one factor--such as complexity, as is often mistakenly claimed. Instead, story points are based on a combination of factors.
• Don’t Equate Story Points to Hours November 22, 2022
  I’ve been quite adamant lately that story points are about time, specifically effort. But that does not mean you should say something like, “One story point = eight hours.” Doing this obviates the main reason to use story points in the...
• Epics, Features and User Stories November 8, 2022
  I've been getting more and more emails lately from people confused about the difference between "user stories", "epics" and "features." So I thought this month we'd return and cover some basic--but very helpful--territory by explaining those terms. First, the terms don't matter that much. These are not terms with important specific meanings like "pointer" to […]