Advanced Release Charting Template – Part 2
In the first part of this blog series, we introduced the Advanced Release Chart Template and discussed how to communicate progress to customers and stakeholders using burnup and burndown charts. The second and final part of this blog series drills into the details of what’s being delivered in the release to help drive decisions and […]
Advanced Release Charting Template – Part 1
In October 2012, we released our first downloadable template to help forecast and chart release progress. Since that time, we’ve helped many organizations transition to Agile and found some recurring needs that have driven the creation of the Advanced Release Charting template: Set expectations about deadlines and report to stakeholders. Will the desired scope be […]
Lean: Purity vs. Pragmatism
“That’s not Agile and Lean!” “We’re not being lean enough.” “We’re not supposed to make deliverables!” Sound familiar? I hear these statements all the time from teams moving towards a more evidence-based approach to product discovery, conception, and production. Somewhere, someone made a decision for the teams to now “do Agile & Lean” and so, […]
Building In-House Agile Innovation Teams: Transparency
In the first post of the series, I discussed the basic building blocks of a successful in-house innovation team: small, dedicated, collocated, and self-sufficient. In this post, I’m going to talk about a key philosophy for these teams: transparency. It’s not in our nature to be transparent in the business world (or in the personal […]
Behavior Driven Development: Steps to Implement, Part I
Behavior Driven Development is the process of writing high-level scenarios verifying a User Story meets the Acceptance Criteria and the expectations of the stakeholders. The automation behind the scenarios is written to initially fail and then pass once the User Story development is complete. BDD is largely a collaboration tool that forces people working on […]
Behavior Driven Development: Steps to Implement, Part II
In the first article of this two-part series, we discussed how to define scenarios for testing. Now, once this is done, the Testers can partially implement the new steps to fail. For example, adding assertions that a file exists on the file system. Or, writing code returning a negative result for now. Maybe the code […]
Tips to Enhance Your Agile Career
Have you ever wondered if you are being utilized to the best of your abilities? Or Are you being held back from that role you feel you deserve? Or When is it the right time to make a proper exit from a company for career development? In my experience talking to thousands of people, it […]
Courage and Craftsmanship
Last week I presented a workshop session called Courageous Software Development Through Craftsmanship (Slides) at Keep Austin Agile 2014 here in Austin. It was a great crowd both at the conference overall and in the session. A few people I talked to after the session said they couldn’t make it and wanted to learn a bit about […]
Automated Testing for Legacy Software Products
Many times, we experiment with ideas and processes on new, or “greenfield”, projects. When starting something new, it is human nature to start with a clean slate and go from there. However, this is not always possible when automating testing. By nature, software features are first tested manually, most of the time followed by scripted […]
Finding the Cure to “Yes”
In this article, we’ll explore the motivation for saying “yes”, understand the damage it can cause, and identify what it takes to be able to say “no”. Agile can help you build a culture focused on frequent delivery of value to customers. In the 12 Principles behind the Agile Manifesto, you’ll find it right at […]