agile

When a single user story that mixes both high-value and low-value functionality is left intact, the flow of value slows. Stories that are too large increase project risk and force a longer development path even when the team would be better off with more frequent feedback. Join Bill Wake as he examines bundling, unbundling, splitting, and merging user stories. He explains and demonstrates concrete techniques for story splitting, along with high-level, user-experience, non-functional, and story-complexity lines. Come away with a toolkit of twenty ways you can split user stories, many of which will be directly applicable to your current or next project. Don't wait for a large story to be finished before benefiting from its high-value parts or force users to wait on low-value functionality. Learn how to reduce project risk and increase the pace of delivering value to your business.

You want to begin adopting agile practices in your team and organization. Where to start? Agile is full of strange terms, new principles, and unfamiliar practices that are not even described consistently from person-to-person and book-to-book. Customer or Product Owner? Sprint or Iteration? Then there are all those new gatherings-sprint planning, stand-ups, retrospectives, reviews, and more. As hard as you try to do things "by the book," it's hard to tell which practices really help and when to implement each. And you thought agile was supposed to be simpler! George Dinwiddie offers a simple and effective approach any team can use to get on the road to a more agile process. By taking baby steps and using pervasive feedback from incremental results, you can steer your organization toward the agile practices it needs to become its best.

The old adage “If you can measure it, you can manage it” also implies that meaningless metrics lead to meaningless management and harmful metrics lead to harmful management. When agile methods encounter metrics that were designed-and have organizational credibility-for non-agile processes and practices, the potential for harm is great. Niel Nickolaisen shares case studies and examples to describe the principles of meaningful-and meaningless or harmful-agile metrics. Meaningful metrics favor accomplishment over activity, measure processes rather than people, communicate clearly, and adjust to fit changing conditions. Filtering our agile metrics through these principles yields dramatic improvements in how we manage and deliver projects and services. For example, what positive and negative behaviors do burndown charts drive?

The hardest part of big projects is that they are BIG. Of course “big” means different things to different people. What some measure in cash, others measure in technology. Little value flows when we focus on the number of people “doing agile.” Big value is more likely to flourish when agility is a tool for overcoming complexity. Instead of a talk about “doing agile in the large”, David Hussman speaks to agility as a tool instead of a mandate. Drawing on experiences helping big projects build big products and systems, David describes ways to successfully introduce large-scale agility, foster and measure success in the early iterations, and take on the coaching challenges and other complexities involved in building and sustaining competitive and healthy agility. Agility that spans teams, time, and features begins with finding a process that helps you learn instead of following a process “from the book”.