Blogs

Technical stories - are they included on the backlog?

January 11, 2010 by Jack Milunsky

Introduction

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 question

The underlying question the team debated was should technical stories appear on the backlog.

What's the ideal Sprint length

November 20, 2009 by Jack Milunsky

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 Context

A team of 5 members currently working with 10-day sprints. They haven't managed in the previous 5 sprints to have 100% of the User Stories completed. It is typically around 60-70% completeness.

Agile Project Management Questions Answered

November 16, 2009 by Kelly Waters

I was asked recently to answer 5 questions about agile project management for a feature on PM Boulevard. I thought you might appreciate seeing them here too...

1. How has the Agile practice evolved over the last two years?

I don’t personally think that agile practices have particularly changed in the last two years, however there is clearly a stronger emphasis on some elements more than others now.

Scrum certainly seems to have crossed into the mainstream since I started my blog. Even though it was less than 3 years ago, Scrum still felt quite new and innovative in the UK at that time. I work in the web development sector and now every company I meet seems to be doing Scrum.

Another change is the interest in agile from the project management community. This seems significant as people start to think more about how best to apply agile on larger projects. Looking at Google Trends, which shows search volumes over time, the graph below shows that search demand for ‘agile project management’ started relatively late in terms of agile adoption, and interest is still growing strongly now.

Product Owner vs Product Manager

November 6, 2009 by Jack Milunsky

Introduction

Based on a recent post on yahoo forums, seems like there may still be confusion out there as to what the differences are between these two roles. Questions like, is there overlap? can the Product Manager take on the responsibilities of the Product Owner? what are the specific requirements for either role? pop up all the time.

There was a really good discussion on the Scrum Development Yahoo group on this topic and some really good points were made. So I'll try to distill this for you here and of course put my own twist on this.

Switching stories mid sprint

October 24, 2009 by Jack Milunsky

Introduction

I blogged about this some time ago and then posted the blog on various agile forums to judge peoples responses.

Most of the responses were well reasoned, however, one of the responses I received shocked me somewhat and so I feel that it's worth blogging about this particular situation once more.

The response I received was "You're not serious you're going to ignore the PO" and "You can't be a slave to the process"

In all fairness, there are many situations under which the need to switch stories arise. And the specifics were not really provided. For example:

State of Agile

October 9, 2009 by Jack Milunsky

Introduction

Seems like there's lots going on in the agile world right now. Lots of talk about Lean and it's impact on Agile. Lots of attacks going on at the CSM certification. Kanban is all over the news these days. And just last week, I read about a new Agile methodology called Stride.

So how do we make sense of this all?

My opinion is that there is value in each of the methodologies (for the purposes of this blog I'll refer to them all as methodologies even though some of you might not think of them as such). It's real important to read about them all so that you are armed with enough knowledge to know what's out there. I see this as a toolset from which you can choose for your specific situation.

Poka Yoke, error handling for your process

October 7, 2009 by Mendelt Siebenga

Software engineering is still a very human endeavor. Its a complex process that requires our ability to create non-standard solutions for non-standard problems. But with this ability to creatively solve problems comes a tendency to introduce defects, one of the seven wastes lean production and lean programming try to eliminate. Jack Milunsky describes several ways to reduce the amount of defects in his article. I want to look at another idea from lean manufacturing for reducing the number of defects called Poka Yoke in Japanese and have a look at how we can apply this idea to software engineering.

The 7 Software Development Wastes - Lean series Part 7 - Defects

September 26, 2009 by Jack Milunsky

Introduction

When one looks at all the wastes, defects has to be the most obvious one. The cost and repercussions of finding defects varies depending on where in the cycle they're found. Defects found early on in the development life-cycle are way less costly to resolve than defects found later on in the cycle; the most expensive being when applications are already in-production.

Additionally, depending on when the defects are found, defects can and do trigger other wastes like task switching, relearning etc.

Defects can be very costly for an organization. So the trick with defects is that you need to 1) Prevent them from happening in the first place and 2) Find and fix them as early in the development life-cycle as possible.

So what can you do to prevent them from happening in the first place?

Photos from AgileEE 2009 in Kev, Ukraine

September 24, 2009 by Artem Marchenko

Few days ago I was honored to speak about Agile Planning on Agile Eastern Europe conference that happened in Kiev on 18th and 19th of September. I promised many people to share the conference photos, so here is a slideshow. I also added some pictures of the Kiev and its people to help you feel the atmosphere and showcase my great photo talent If you prefer looking at photos one by one, you can find them in this flickr collection.

I hope you'll like the pictures.
Enjoy!

The dirty secret of pair programming

September 22, 2009 by Mendelt Siebenga

Pair programming is one of the more controversial extreme programming practices. Having two people work on the same piece of code at the same time looks very unpractical and inefficient to someone not familiar with this practice. Pair programming proponents like me are usually quick to point out the benefits like improved quality, less rework, better communication and better knowledge sharing within teams but I think the biggest reason pair programming works is usually kept quiet.