Despite the contempt many of us agile folks have for SAFe, this “Scaled Agile Framework” might still have one useful purpose. — Note: this article is based on my experience and observations. You may disagree with my opinion. So I invite you to share your perspective with me. Why many agile people hate SAFe Just looking at the overview image of SAFe gives many agile folks (including me) goose bumps. This complex map of process hierarchies, roles and…

Countless teams have moaned over Scrum being too rigid and not really suited for their particular domain. As an agile coach responsible for countless agile transitions I strongly disagree. WHY DO TEAMS CLAIM SCRUM WOULD BE TOO RIGID? There are several reasons and the behavior we encounter in the wild during an agile transition is usually a mix of…

So many companies struggle with their move to agility — why is that? — Chances are you know or are part of a company whose agile transformation got stuck half-way and failed to deliver the big promises of agility. At this point you may doubt whether agility really works at all. You’re not alone — it seems the majority of companies starting an agile…

If you want to test a a NodeJS application with Jest, you often need to set local environment variables. Usually these variables are set on the server when deploying your application, but they’re not available locally for testing. A common pattern is to use a .env file with all variables…

The responsibilities of the Product Owner in Scrum are frequently misunderstood and misinterpreted. As a result, thousands of “Product Owners” around the world do harm the team performance more than they help. Here are a few symptoms which tell you, whether you’re off the track as a Product Owner. You manage people instead of the product

This is a growing collection of my learnings from building web applications with AWS Amplify — AWS Amplify is a wonderful idea. In theory it simplifies all the messy coordination of different Amazon Web Services and speeds up building new products. In practice however, Amplify is not quite there yet. …

Or: Would you trust a Geiger counter to save your life? Disclaimer: I love Scrum — it’s an awesome framework! But too many people believe that Scrum would make their company agile; this is wrong and this is why I wrote this article. Enjoy. When I went to Chernobyl, a…

In today’s climate, it’s best to assume that most business models, even successful ones, will have a short lifespan. ― Alexander Osterwalder, Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers If business models have a short lifespan, how can we create long-term success for our business? …

A hands-on process we use to get from feature requests to happy customers — Doing lean startup and customer development in practice is a challenge. Here is how we at gixtra.com get from features requests of users to happy customers. The full process Here is the process in short. I will describe it in more detail below. Receive requests via Intercom Create a user story in GitHub…