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All of this content used to be spread over three different blogs at three different domains and it's now been merged into one. Why was it ever three? Because at the time it seemed reasonable that each of them was for a different audiences, and yet over time I've found that the lines between topic areas got blurrier and tended to overlap. So now they're all together in one place.

If you encounter things that seem broken, let me know and I'll get them fixed.

Browse by topic area:

Category	Formerly found at
Psychology & Behaviour	UnconsciousAgile.com
Flow, Kanban, Scrum	ImprovingFlow.com
Metrics and Forecasting	ImprovingFlow.com & MikesHardMetrics.com
Technical Practices	AgileTechnicalExcellence.com

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There's a lot here and if you're not sure where to start, here are some popular starting points. From these, you'll find crosslinks to even more topics. Enjoy!

• Neuroscience / Psychology
  • Psychological Safety: An overview. For the science, see the SAFETY model. For Google's research into why it's important for high performing teams, see Project Aristotle. What happens when we don't have that safety?
  • Anxiety and Stress: For the science, see Polyvagal Theory or a description of some neuroscience, illustrated with a bear encounter. To let go of that anxiety, see the Anti-Anxiety toolkit.
  • Generally more about the brain: Cognitive bias, motivation, default mode network, systems 1 & 2 and neurotransmitters (chemicals) that drive behaviour.
• Language patterns: Why language is so important, and Clean Language, a specific language pattern that has excellent application for coaching.
• How to improve...
  • Meetings: The common problems with meetings. Improving the standup / daily coordination meeting. Retrospectives are covered in my popular video course Retrospective Magic. Then what if your people won't participate?
  • Improving learning: with neuroscience and LEGO.
  • Improvement: Continuous improvement in general. Understanding the metaphor of "lowering the water level".
• Flow of value
  • Metrics: Flow metrics, probabilistic forecasting.
  • Waste: Overview of waste. Understanding the cost of interruptions, and the kinds of waste that gets in the way of flow.
  • Work in progress (WIP): Setting initial WIP limits. What to do when we're overwhelmed with WIP
  • Metrics and Forecasting: All of these have their own category now.
• Technical practices: Continuous integration, TDD as design, and ensemble programming.
• Ensuring we're building the right thing: Slicing stories and epics. Understanding the context of what we're building. Knowing how to prioritize that work.
• Something fun: The millennial whoop, and inattentional blindness.
• Recommended reading: I'm often asked for book recommendationsbook recommendations.

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Monte Carlo under the covers

Monte Carlo forecasting is the most common form of probabilistic forecasting that we see. It’s compelling because it can provide a highly accurate forecast of when work will be done, with relatively little effort.

Playful learning with LEGO

Last week at Agile Open Canada, I brought out the LEGO again, to illustrate technical practices. While there is so much we can do effectively remotely, there are some things that really do benefit from being together in the same room, and this is one of them.

What is Probabilistic Forecasting?

Do your customers ever ask “When will it be done?” When dealing with the future, there’s almost never an accurate deterministic answer (Tuesday, exactly at 3:45pm) to that question but there is an accurate probabilistic answer (85% chance of completion on or before October 1) and in most cases, it’s a lot easier to calculate than you’d expect.

Test driving prime factors in Go / Testify

This article will show how to “test drive” the prime factors kata in Go with Testify. Testing in Go is built right in, which is great. It’s a very bare-bones implementation though so adding Testify to the mix makes it a lot easier to write your tests.

Test driving prime factors in Java / JUnit

This article will show how to “test drive” the prime factors kata in Java with JUnit, an xUnit style unit testing framework.

How often do we run our tests?

Today, automated tests¹ are fairly ubiquitous in software projects. That is, almost every project has a large number of automated tests and that they tend to get run by some continuous integration (CI) server.

1. More precisely, what we’re talking about are automated checks, not tests, but the agile community has never adjusted to using the more precise language so I’m going to keep calling them tests here. ↩

Improvements in CSS: Dark mode and CSS variables

Ryan and I started working on dark mode support for jirametrics and have discovered that CSS now has much better support for this sort of thing than it’s ever had in the past. Specifically, the latest versions of all the main browsers, now support dark mode directly, as well as CSS variables, which simplifies much of the configuration.

Ladder of Leadership

Sometimes our people aren’t taking initiative in the way we hope they will. This could be due to an issue of motivation or a lack of safety or more generally a system that discourages that initiative in some way. Whatever the reason might be, we need a way to change the conditions to get the result we want.

Jirametrics 2.0

Jirametrics version 2.0 has been released. What is it? A tool for extracting metrics, and generating reports from Jira.

Jira API: Board details

Next we’ll look at the API to get information about a board. Boards are fundamentally broken, in my opinion, because they aren’t a real thing in Jira. They’re a view into issues at a point in time, which means that they don’t show up anywhere in the history. You can’t tell what board an issue was on when a status change happened, and you can’t assign an issue to a board.