June 2010

Empower Your Team – You Won’t Regret It

by Matthias Marschall on June 29, 2010 · 1 comment

It’s hard to find the right structure for any organization. A lot of existing management wisdom comes from a time when you had to organize a physical work force. However, with today’s “knowledge workers” those structures don’t work as nicely anymore.

Size Matters – Why You Should Prefer Small User Stories

by Matthias Marschall on June 22, 2010 · 4 comments

If you have a lot of big user stories, your velocity will jump up and down wildly. This makes it extremely difficult to tell when a user story will be done. Breaking down your huge user stories into smaller ones will help you smooth the flow and give you a clearer picture.

How To Estimate User Stories When Using PivotalTracker

by Matthias Marschall on June 15, 2010 · 10 comments

For a team new to agile software development, estimating user stories is not easy. The team is used to estimate tasks in hours and days, and know they’re never right anyways. So why bother? In agile, estimating user stories relative to each other using story points can give you a fact based idea about what [...]

The Moving Parts Managing your infrastructure with Opscode Chef involves a few moving parts you need to be aware of. As I found it quite hard to differentiate, I want to share the basics with you:

Post image for Scrum What? New Community Edited Q&A Site About Agile, Lean, Kanban and Scurm

A lot of people I meet are interested in agile software development. Either they’ve heard about it or they participate in projects which use Scrum, Kanban, or Extreme Programming. They wonder whether it makes sense to do pair programming, which Kanban tools to use, how to get started with test driven development or how to [...]