Why are our Sprints so Crazy?
If Your Sprints are crazy, do any of these issues sound familiar? During Sprint Planning, it’s impossible for the team to break tasks into small enough chunks to be completed in a day QA gets scrunched at the end of the Sprint The team waits on design completion during the Sprint and cannot begin development […]
7 Principles of Lean Software Development
I recommend reading Implementing Lean Software Development by Tom and Mary Poppendieck. They do a good job of breaking down the 7 Principles of Lean Software Development into some very easy to understand concepts. Here is a taste of what this book will open your mind to: Principle 1: Eliminate Waste Waste is anything that […]
4 Advantages of Physical Task Boards
For new teams, I try and encourage them to use a physical task board over tracking tasks in a tool. This can be problematic when all team members are not in the same location, but it has some huge advantages for co-located teams. Structure of our Task Board: 5 Columns: Planned, In Progress, Verify, Hours […]
5 Reasons Why Estimating in Story Points is a Superior Method
I get a little resistance from teams to start using Story Points for estimating, but it really is a superior way to estimate over hour based estimates. Story Points should be used to estimate User Stories and quickly provide estimates to the Product Owner so that they can prioritize the product backlog. I recommend using […]
5 Effects of Shippable Product Every 30 Days
“What do you think the impact will be on an organization of having a potentially shippable product increment at least every 30 days?” This is one of the hardest feats to accomplish, but a critical component in highly successful Scrum. Here are my top 5 advantages of a Shippable Product Every Month: Customer/ stakeholder engagement […]
The value of developers doing Acceptance TDD
I believe Test-Driven Development is one of the key Agile practices that should be combined with Scrum in order to be highly productive. Scott Ambler’s recent article on Tragic Mistakes When Adopting Test-Driven Development (TDD) in Dr. Dobbs.outlines TDD. Two forms of TDD With “developer TDD”you typically use a xUnit tool, such as JUnit for […]
Struggle with Self Organizing teams
I think getting teams to be self-organizing in a productive way is one of the toughest challenges of Scrum. I remember early on in our adoption of Scrum when I was having trouble getting the teams to embrace a self-organizing culture. I brought in a trainer/coach and after careful observation, he told the management team […]
What can we learn from the failure of Duke Nukem?
I just read an article about how the Duke Nukem project went on for 12 years and never released. A comment from the article, “he did not appear to have an endgame — an overall plan for what the finished product would look like, and thus a way to recognize when it was nearing completion” […]