agile
Articles
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User Story Heuristics: Understanding Agile Requirements Agile emphasizes just-in-time requirements rather than upfront preparation. The requirements person—be it the product owner, business analyst, product manager, or someone else—embodies the understanding of what is needed, and the user story represents the work that needs doing. This article details what user stories are (and what they are not). |
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The Art of Maximizing Work Not Done One of the twelve principles behind the Agile Manifesto is “Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential.” Why is this principle called an art, while the others aren’t? And why should we maximize the amount of work "not" done? This article analyzes the importance of simplicity in agile projects. |
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Help Your Team Understand Its Iteration Burndown A good key indicator for measuring how well your agile team is performing is the burndown chart. It’s a simple concept—as time passes, the amount of work to do decreases. Of course, there will be days when progress is not as expected or tasks end up larger than originally estimated. A burndown can help your team reset and keep stakeholders in the loop. |
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The Benefits of Pair Programming This article details a team’s experience in implementing pair programming as a way to get work done as part of its agile transformation. It delves into the many positive results from the pairing experiment, as well as some of the negatives that were encountered, and weighs whether developers think pair programming is a worthwhile endeavor. |
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Using the Definition of Done to Promote Continuous Improvement The definition of done is much more than just a checklist for completeness—it can be a mechanism for determining where your product increment can be more complete by the end of your sprint. By using a discussion board with quadrants where you can sort sprint items, you can challenge yourself to see whether a task could be moved earlier in the lifecycle. |
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How Do You Recruit Team Members with Agile Mindsets? The traditional ways of finding employees are changing. If you want to get a role that will make you happy to contribute to the team, you need to rethink the way you apply for roles. If you are the resource manager, change how you recruit. This article focuses on the qualities you should be exemplifying or looking for if you want to form a team with an agile mindset. |
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User Story Points versus Man-Hours: Estimating Effort Better Effort estimation is a major challenge for all the stakeholders of a project. Most people generally underestimate situations that may block progress and consider only the best-case scenario for a project. Your choice of estimation method may not be helping, though. Which would be better for your team: estimating by man-hours or by user story points? |
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Turn Up Your Agile Noise Usually noise has a negative connotation, but in this sense, noise means something that increases the team progress (i.e., velocity) and output (i.e., quality). Chaos is the negative side of noise and decreases velocity. Teams should know the importance of agile noise and handle the chaos in a right way at the time of transformation. Let’s explore agile noise and its benefits. |
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Why Adopting Agile Won’t Magically Reduce Your IT Budget Of course, all companies would like to reduce their budgets. But cutting back in the IT department can have unintended consequences. This article looks at two of the more well-adopted cost-cutting approaches, the software factory and distributed teams, and goes into how they can help and hurt your company. |
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Make Your Retrospectives Engaging Again After performing so many meetings at the ends of your sprints, agile retrospectives can become monotonous and boring—and that’s when they become ineffective. This article looks at the reasons this happens and provides some ideas for making those retrospective meetings more lively and effective—and therefore more useful. |
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