Yesterday, I was waiting for the train to arrive for my daily commute. After it pulled up to the station, a mother with a baby carriage tried to disembark. She struggled with the carriage while carrying a heavy bag, a second child pulling her arm. Naturally, I jumped in to help out and she was [...]
Kanban & Agile
“What is agile?” or “What is kanban?” are questions a lot of people are asking. They wonder whether applying extreme programming techniques or managing user requirements with User Stories is of any value. This area shows you why agile practices are worthwhile software development methods. How can you improve your requirement gathering? What is agile testing? And how do we measure success using agile web development? Read through the articles in this section and find out for yourself!
Almost 9:30am. Time for our stand-up. What did I finish yesterday? What do I plan on finishing today? What’s stopping me? The daily routine of the morning stand-up is so ingrained, I go through the above liturgy without conscious thought. For me, the stand-up provides a focused center for the team, our morning huddle. We [...]
Self-organizing teams perform better than micro-managed ones. The ability to really make a difference motivates the team members and makes everyone contribute his best effort. But how can we create self-organizing teams when everyone is used to hierarchical command and control patterns?
This is a guest post by Prasad Chaudhari, freelance java consultant. He was appointed as a project manager for the project mentioned below and played a role of ScrumMaster. The first prerequisite to going agile offshore is a mature and realistic understanding of agile at home. We’ve been practicing scrum on-site for several years including [...]
It’s amazing. Talking to a bunch of fellow CTOs I heard a lot of them saying: “We introduced Scrum and it works really well” and “we’re too slow to bring new features to our customers”. This piqued my curiosity. Scrum is supposed to speed up feature delivery through short iterations. How can an organization claim [...]
You’ve most probably been there: To win that one ueber-important client, your friendly sales rep sells the farm and his grandmother (well actually he sells features, which he invents right in front of the client to make sure to get the deal, but the effect is nearly the same). And not only does he sell [...]
Maybe you read it long ago, or it’s been on your “to read” list for years. Or maybe you’ve never heard of it: The book “Good to Great” by James C. Collins. It describes how companies move from being average to great and how they can fail to make the transition. So, what does all [...]
In Scrum, sprints are time-boxed delivery cycles that help keep the team focused on the goal. If you don’t know which goal I’m referring to, check out Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt’s novel “The Goal” (hint: I think it’s something about making money). For web development, I run weekly sprints and this surprises a lot of [...]
Sitting in unnecessary meetings sucks. You know what I’m talking about: A lot of people crammed into one room, half of whom have no business with the discussion. The other half are responsible for the topic, but didn’t bother preparing for the discussion. So why are all these people sitting together? Let’s examine this from [...]
