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Assessing the Business Value of Agile User Stories Allan Kelly says that ideally, companies should put a dollar amount on each planned business decision. But pinning down financial value can be hard, and besides, there are many other factors to consider, such as sustainability and customer service. He looks at various ways to assess the business value of user stories.
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Stop Re-estimating Your Stories for Every Iteration Many agile practitioners recommend re-estimating stories at the beginning of each iteration to increase accuracy. Adrian Wible, however, argues that re-estimating stories within an iteration planning meeting actually distorts results and decreases predictability. See if you need to rethink your planning procedures.
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Rethinking Workflow for Virtual Teams When you switch from working in an office with all your coworkers right beside you to working remotely and collaborating with people in other countries or even time zones, you have to change more about how you work than just the way you communicate. Magnus Ljadas details how his virtual team modified their tools, infrastructure, and processes.
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Realizing Value by Establishing an Agile Project Management Office Some believe that an overarching organizational and governance model to structure operations in agile environments is needed. An agile project management organization can act as an aggregator and evaluator of agile project data metrics to help leaders track performance for improved value delivery.
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Agile or Not? Asking the Right Questions Many organizations dipping their toes into agile just want to know one thing: Are we agile or not? Most agilists agree, however, that rather than a binary designation, agile is more of a continuum. It's a sliding scale that can vary across the development lifecycle. A better question is: How agile are you?
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Seven Signs of Great Agile Leadership Agile teams are self-organizing, which means they do not need supervisors—at least in theory. But they do need leaders to create a shared vision of what the product will be. And having an agile team means that anyone can step up … including you. Lanette Creamer outlines seven qualities possessed by great agile leaders.
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Working with Nonfunctional Requirements Nonfunctional requirements describe aspects of the system that do not map onto a single piece of functionality. Essentially, they're constraints you need to operate within. Allan Kelly details how running performance tests regularly can be the key to nonfunctional requirements, as well as how much value these constraints produce.
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5 Ways Testers Can Mitigate Practical Risks in an Agile Team Testers who analyze quality in every aspect of the team’s deliverables also have a responsibility to mitigate risks and practical issues that are bound to come up, and help the team succeed in their product as well as at being agile. Here are five such issues that testers can help the team alleviate or avoid.
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How Agile Teams Should Use the Definition of Done The definition of done is an informal checklist that the team agrees applies to all pieces of work. But how does the definition compare to acceptance criteria? And should it apply to every task, or every story? How often should you review or change your definition? Allan Kelly helps you navigate your team's definition of done.
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Acceptance Criteria, Specifications, and Tests One of the benefits of agile is how it helps specify requirements. Instead of trying to predict the future with your requests, you can wait an iteration and see if more criteria are needed. This article gets into how executable specifications, specification by example, and test automation can help further improve your requirements management.
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