Recommended Agile Blogs

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Although I love to innovate and blaze a trail, I would far rather learn from other people’s mistakes and avoid them making them myself. I also enjoy reading from others working in the same field as me so that I can gain from their experience.

I have listed my top dozen favourite blogs below, mostly from Agile luminaries, let me know if there are good ones that I have missed:

1. Mike Cohn: As a popular Scrum trainer, author of three top Agile books and founder of Mountain Goat Software and Front Row Agile Mike has great practical experience from running Scrum teams over the past two decades. This blog contains great posts about the practicalities of running Agile teams in development with specific expertise in estimation and user stories.  Mike Cohn
2. Henrik Kniberg : Henrik is an Agile coach working at Crisp Consultants for companies including Spotify and Lego. Henrik is the author of three great Agile books and the creator of several popular Agile videos. His blogs are a pleasure to read with an informal style and contain low-level development knowledge from working as part of Agile teams.  Henrik Kniberg
3. Roman Pichler – Roman has released two Agile books, works as a teacher and consultant within the Agile domain, and has 15 years’ experience. He is an expert in product management and product ownership and his blog posts reflect this.  Roman Pichler
4. Jeff Sutherland – As co-creator of Scrum Jeff infrequently posts on general Scrum topics and book reviews. This is a good resource in learning where Scrum is today and the direction envisioned by one of its creators. Jeff Sutherland
5. Ken Schwaber – Ken along with Jeff (above) created Scrum in the early 1990s and in this blog he focuses upon how to scale Scrum with the Nexus framework. Ken has a developer level focus which is good to see, he is also entertaining and really not a fan of SAFe…  Ken Schwaber
6. Alistair Cockburn – Manifesto signatory and creator of Crystal Clear (but don’t hold that against him), Alistair is a prolific author and entertaining blogger. Often challenging, frequently funny and always insightful Alistair’s posts are worth reading and searching through to learn from one of our industries thought leaders.  Alistair Cockburn
7. Lyssa Adkins – Author of Coaching Agile Teams Lyssa has been an Agile coach and trainer for over a decade and this shows in the quality of her posts. With a focus on coaching the posts are in-depth and genuinely useful.  Lyssa Adkins
8. David Anderson – David is the creator of the Kanban method and author of three books including Kanban – Successful Evolutionary Change for your Technology Business. Very detailed posts looking in-depth at Kanban and enterprise planning.  David Anderson
9. Ron Jeffries – A legend in the software industry, Ron was one of the three founders of extreme programming (XP). His site contains a huge amount of articles that cover most software development areas. Ron Jeffries
10. Tobias Mayer – Tobias is the author of The Peoples Scrum and highly entertaining technology anarchist. He is also a radical engineer and opponent of old-school waterfall and theory-x, Tayloresque, hierarchical and command and control management. Well worth reading, if only to cheer yourself up!  Tobias Mayer
11. All About Agile101 ways are an Agile and digital consultancy with a great blog area from multiple authors. Kelly Waters as CEO provides a good range of blogs if you are looking for a wider viewpoint.  Kelly Waters
12. Implementing Scrum – Michael Vizdos’ blog has cartoons of Chicken and Pig which present Agile situations in a humorous way. But please don’t ever tell me the story that starts with Chicken telling Pig “Hey Pig, I was thinkin’ we should open a restaurant”.  Michael Vizdos

 

Ok, that’s it for now – twelve shiny sites full of hard-earned experience for us to all learn from and whilst I am here there is one more great site that lists a lot of blog links for you to work through:

100+ Top Agile Blogs – As a well-known Agile coach and author of Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives Luis Gonçalves has compiled a list of over 100 Agile blog links.