Agile Management

Agile Project Management

This blog covers all aspects of Agile project management.

• — Story Point accounting – I am on the fence on this one folks...or am I?

     (Sunday, 22 January 2012 21:42)

   

  Firstly, I'd like to say thanks to everyone for the wonderful comments received in regards my writing. Frankly, I am flattered. I'd also like to apologize again for not writing more regularly. It seems like I just never get the time these days with my busy life. The scenario I want to specifically talk about today is as follows: You plan a Story into a sprint, let’s say an 8 point Story, but the team doesn’t get to finish the Story. How should you account for the Story Points in the current and subsequent Sprints? Let’s just say for explanation's...

• — New Found Respect for Story Points

     (Friday, 25 March 2011 01:43)

   

  I gotta tell you, I have been using Story Points with teams for quite some time now. But recently, working with onboarding more than 9 teams at one company in the space of 3 months, I have learned to appreciate what Story Points really mean and the effect that they have on making teams successful. With each new team that is getting up to speed with Scrum, the hardest transition is figuring out how to estimate in Story Points. There are many ways to help teams do this, including starting them off with 1 story point = 1 ideal day....

• — What’s in a Story – Breaking things down

     (Tuesday, 07 December 2010 02:36)

   

  When I think back on my Scrum experiences I keep coming to the same conclusion - that the mechanics behind “Stories” has to be the most important aspect of the process. If your “Stories” are properly “designed” then you have the best shot at succeeding with Scrum. So when I say “designed” what do I really mean? Let me explain …. For starters while I believe that the format of the Story is important (I wrote about this some time back that the format is not the most important thing though) when I say design I mean the careful thought...

• — User stories: Does the format matter

     (Monday, 22 November 2010 14:00)

   

  We are all familiar with the suggested format of a user story "As a I want so that " What's great about this format is that you capture a great deal of context for the developer with very little information presented. And while I believe this context is important, I don't believe the specific format is the most important thing to worry about. First off, when you take a look at many backlogs the repetition of "As a blah ..." can drive you nuts. Second, most backlogs you see, stories are written - "As a user blah...

• — Whose doing your Sprint demos

     (Wednesday, 17 November 2010 03:33)

   

  Ok, this has to be the shortest blog post ever. But just maybe it's something useful you can try. So this is more of a tip than a blog post. Typically during the Sprint demos the devlopers do the dog and pony shows. They coded it and so they generally like to do the demos. What we tried out at my last gig, was for the QA folks to do the demos. What's good about this is that it really shows the chickens and pigs that the loop has been closed. As we all know, it's acceptance tested stories that...

• — User Stories defined - notes from the XP forum

     (Thursday, 07 October 2010 02:02)

   

  I was recently following a thread on the XP forum and one of the responses from Ron Jeffries is worth repeating here for you all to read. " Um, yes. Or as someone put it long ago, a user story consists of ... Card Conversation Confirmation The card is just a token used to pass around if one estimates, to hang on the wall as something to be done, to move around the status board, and so on. It is in conversation between PO and team that the team learns what is really meant. It is here that much of...

• — Technical stories - are they included on the backlog?

     (Thursday, 21 January 2010 05:20)

   

  If you're not already a member of the Scrum development group on Yahoo, you really should join. There's a fortune of information changing hands and you can learn so much from the interactions. Just recently there was a huge debate on the topic of technical stories. The underlying question the team debated was should technical stories appear on the backlog. If they are on the backlog, it means the technical stories are to be prioritized by the PO. This may not be such a good idea considering that PO's are generally going to be biased towards prioritizing features and functionality...

• — What's the ideal sprint length

     (Saturday, 09 January 2010 05:08)

   

  Introduction I may have blogged about this previously. I have written so many blogs, I can't recall any more. However questions regarding Sprint length surface on the forums regularly. As per usual, the answers one must give always depends on the context and every context is different than the next. So let me start with the context - this is an excerpt of a post on the scrum development group on Yahoo. Incidentally, Yahoo groups is a good place to hang out. You learn a lot from all the questions and the different contexts facing teams around the world. The...

• — Sprint start and stop days - what's best

     (Thursday, 07 January 2010 03:34)

   

  Firstly, let me state that it is imperative that sprint lengths remain consistent. By all means experiment with 1 week, 2 week or 3 week sprints but once you have figured out your sweet spot, stick to it. This is important to setup a rhythm in the company. However, the question is what days are the best days during the week to start and stop sprints. Until now, I have been a big fan of Monday starts and ending Fridays. It seems to be a natural cadence and the days are logical transition points. However, this week, there was discussion...

• — What is a Spike in Scrum

     (Monday, 16 November 2009 21:07)

   

  This question comes up time and time again and the Spike is often confused with the Tracer bullet. Adam Sroka posted a great explanation of the difference between the two on the Yahoo Scrumdevelopment group . So I am quoting Adam verbatim here - thanks Adam."The Pragmatic Programmers described something called a "Tracer Bullet" which: 1) Is an experimental solution that cuts through all the "layers" of the architecture. 2) Is not necessarily time-boxed. 3) Is not intended to be thrown away. Eric Evans talks about "Thin, vertical slices," which are the same as Tracer Bullets. A Spike Solution: 1)...