The Art of Agile
I was a consultant for 23 years before I joined OpenSesame as their VP of Engineering. Now, three years later, I’m returning to consulting. I enjoyed my time as VP. It gave me the opportunity to see my work play out over the long term, and it gave me fresh insights into the demands faced by executives. So why return to consulting? Put simply: impact. I have the ability to see below surface…
I’ll get straight to the point: your AI coding agent, the one you use to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs. Not by a little bit, either. You write code twice as quick now? Better hope you’ve halved your maintenance costs. Three times as productive? One third the maintenance costs. Otherwise, you’re screwed. You’re trading a temporary speed boost for permanent indenture. Oh, you…
When I’m not ranting about software development online, I like to relax with tabletop board games and RPGs. Recently, I built a game table out of extruded aluminum. It came out pretty well! I’ve provided instructions in case you’d like to build your own. Download the instructions here. (v1.0)
This is a transcript of my keynote presentation at the Agile Cambridge conference in England on October 2nd, 2025. The topic was “The Accountability Problem.” How do we define software department accountability so our business partners don’t do it for us? Introduction The Accountability Problem Demonstrating Accountability Quantifying the Bet The First Two Years Conclusion Thanks for having me.…
I gave the opening keynote at the Regional Scrum Gathering Tokyo conference on January 8th, 2025. My topic was “The Best Product Engineering Org in the World:” How do you create the best product engineering organization in the world? James Shore had to face that question in his new role as Vice President of Engineering. In the end, it came down to six answers, and six new questions: People. We’d…
Jade Rubick interviewed me for his “Decoding Leadership” podcast recently. We had a delightful conversation about scaling organizations. We talked about using FaST for increasing the size of teams, the role of management, and scaling development practices using player-coaches. It’s an engaging conversation that’s chock-full of interesting ideas. Take a look.
Brent Miller: In April we would announce what we were doing for the conference in October... the year before Upscale we got zero done, which was just a terrible situation for us to be in. ...We started working on [Upscale] in the fall after the whiff on our conference, knowing we were going to roll it out in the spring—probably after we made the commitments for the fall—and we were going to have…
This is a transcript of my keynote presentation for the Regional Scrum Gathering Tokyo conference on January 8th, 2025. Watch the video here. Introduction People Internal Quality Lovability Visibility Agility Profitability “How are you measuring productivity?” It was September 2023 and my CEO was asking me a question. “How are you measuring productivity?” It was September 2023, my CEO was asking…
Back in April , I posted the new career ladder I was planning to introduce at OpenSesame, which I’ve joined as VP of Engineering. We rolled it out in July, so now’s a good time to share what we’ve learned so far. Here’s the latest version of the ladder. (PDF) Culture Changes The purpose of the new career ladder is to help change the engineering culture at OpenSesame. The previous career ladder put…
One of my most enduring works is the Agile Fluency Model, which I created with Diana Larsen. Our original article, The Agile Fluency Model: A Brief Guide to Success with Agile has been translated into multiple languages. And now... that includes Brazilian Portuguese! Download the Brazilian Portuguese version here. Many thanks to Renato Barbieri for creating this translation for us. His book, Uma…
I’m thrilled to announce that my commercial “Testing Without Mocks” training course is now available for free ! “Testing Without Mocks” Training My “Testing Without Mocks” resources—also known as “Nullables”—are consistently among the most popular material on this site. I used to offer an instructor-led course for it. But I’m too busy for that now, so I’ve released that same high-quality course in…
In my new role as VP of Engineering , there was one question I was dreading more than any other: “How are you measuring productivity?” I can’t fault the question. I mean, sure, I’d rather it be phrased about how I’m improving productivity, rather than how I’m measuring it, but fair enough. I need to be accountable for engineering productivity. There are real problems in the org, I do need to fix…
Update: See an update on our progress in my August update . I’ve been quiet lately, and that’s because I’ve joined OpenSesame as Vice President of Engineering. It’s been a fascinating opportunity to rebuild an engineering organization from the inside, and I’m loving every minute. We’re introducing a lot of cutting-edge software development practices, such as self-organizing vertically-scaled teams…
I’m pleased to announce that the Korean translation of The Art of Agile Development is now available! You can buy it here . Many thanks to 김모세 for their hard work on this translation.
I’m pleased to announce that there’s a special edition of The Art of Agile Development available in the Indian subcontinent and Africa! (It’s in English.) You can buy it here . Many thanks to Shroff Publishers & Distributors Pvt. Ltd. (SPD) for making this edition available.