Mike Cohn
Member for
23 years 9 monthsMike Cohn is the founder of Mountain Goat Software, where he teaches and coaches on Scrum and agile development. He is the author of Succeeding Succeeding with Agile: Software Development Using Scrum, Agile Estimating and Planning, and User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development. Mike is a founding member of the Scrum Alliance and the Agile Alliance. He can be reached at www.mountaingoatsoftware.com.
All Articles by Mike Cohn
All Stories by Mike Cohn
| Agile and the Seven Deadly Sins of Project ManagementAgile approaches to software development promise many advantages: shorter schedules, more productive teams, products that better meet customer expectations, higher quality, and more. In this talk, Mike Cohn explains how agile teams achieve these goals by avoiding the seven deadly sins of project management. Covered will be sins such as gluttony, sloth, lust, opaqueness, and more. | |
| Cases Against Applying Schedule Pressure Do you think that by removing deadlines from a project a team will have enough time to create perfect software? Theoretically, it's possible, but in this column Mike Cohn explains that this theory might not hold against ingrained behavior. He recalls how several teams reacted when deadlines were lifted from the projects they were working on. Their only goal: to produce perfect software. But that goal inadvertently brought something to the surface, that old habits die hard. |
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Whipped Cream on Top of the Sundae Service and a good variety of features are key in developing relationships with the customer. We always want to satisfy our customers. But if we sometimes exceed their expectations, overly satisfied customers will more than likely spread the news about our service or product--we've added whipped cream, and maybe even a cherry, on top of their ice cream. In this week's column, Mike Cohn explains how he measures customer satisfaction using Kano analysis, which categorizes the features customers look for into baseline, linear, and exciter features. Doing so will help us identify which features will delight our end users, and help us surpass the level of simple satisfaction. |
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Hold That Decision In the rush to complete a project, teams often make hasty decisions, including decisions about which features will be included when the product is released. Rather than making quick decisions, a team should defer a critical decision. Especially if they might learn more throughout the project that will help them make a better decision. In this week's column, Mike Cohn explains the importance of taking advantage of the new knowledge project teams acquire and how this allows them to make better decisions by deferring them. |
| Learning Speed from Quality Programming | |
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Preventing Late Tasks from Creating Late Projects We like to think that being late on one task isn't so bad because early and late completions will average out over the course of an entire project. If you flip a coin 1,000 times, it will land on heads about 500 times and on tails about 500 times. If your project has 1,000 tasks, about 500 will finish early and about 500 will finish late, right? Wrong--and many project plans are sunk by this common misperception. |