Matt Blodgett

Value, value, getting value to users. Work on the most valuable thing, always. You could probably summarize the Agile philosophy as "de...

Teams vary in the amount of handwringing their leaders do about sprints that aren't perfectly rightsized. What if we bit off too much wo...

One of my optimistic beliefs about software engineers is that we're full of good ideas about how things around us could be improved. We...

One of the greatest services that software engineers provide is that we help people understand their own thought processes. We're transc...

The Product Owner has the final say in backlog prioritization. But who writes the backlog? Is it always the product owner? My experience ...

There are tensions in Scrum anywhere you have intra-sprint cycles that must resolve by the end of the sprint. In my last post I wrote about ...

After working for many years in the software industry, almost always using a methodology resembling Scrum, there are certain tensions that I...

Recently I was re-reading Joel Spolsky's classic blog post  The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code . I hadn't read that post in many...

Vision is so important in software development. Without the engineers understanding the overall vision, they can't resolve ambiguity in ...

It's interesting to listen to the word choices that people use in the daily standup . "I should be done with that today." ...

Spike is fun to say.  Spike! For the unfamiliar, the spike is a concept from Agile methodologies that means a time-boxed backlog item wher...

I wrote in 2017 a post called Don't Trap Your Clients in the Bikeshed . That post was about avoiding the trap of seeking feedback on tri...

I’m constantly shocked that business people don’t make much of an effort to communicate to engineers the impact of their work. It’s par for ...

I've written a lot about the concept of sustainability on this blog, and it's something I'm constantly thinking about with rega...

When sprints are well planned and sustainably paced, it's natural to have developers who have finished all of their committed backlog it...

It is common practice to make a list of essential features, think about them for a while, and then decide that they define the next release ...

In Lean , there's a lot of talk about reducing work in progress (WIP). It's interesting to me that even though it seems that Lean c...

A thread showed up in my Twitter feed the other day from  Dragan Stepanović about the low efficiency of pull requests for small changes and...

In all my years in the software industry, I've never seen a team where I would say the methodology they professed to use actually matter...

In a presentation I gave at a past job, I summarized the Agile philosophy as: "Deliver business value to real users faster." Maybe...