Today was a great day. I helped import our entire “roadmap” of functional requirements from an Excel spreadsheet into Pivotal Tracker. Even though we allocated almost a half-day to accomplish this, it was done in less than two hours (including in-depth descriptions and backgrounds on many features I hadn’t yet seen). The product manager’s eyes [...]
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!
One of the most challenging things about introducing Agile in the workplace is that it’s not very widespread. People have heard mixed reviews about it’s implementations, and are hesitant to exchange the known (no matter how bad it may be), for the unknown. More and more companies, however, are adopting Scrum for their project management. [...]
Scrum defines a set of required meetings: Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Scrum Review, and Scrum Retrospective. Additionally, there might be a Scrum of Scrums, if you’re running multiple Scrum teams in parallel. If you’re doing two week sprints you spend at least half-a-day per week in Scrum meetings. Isn’t that a lot of additional overhead?
This is a guest post by Boris Gloger (@borisgloger) A couple of days ago I commented on Matthias’ post about the myth that Scrum forces a team to release new functionality only after a sprint is finished while Kanban would is more flexible. I wanted to know the difference between Scrum and Kanban, and why [...]
In the heat of introducing agile practices like daily stand-up meetings, retrospectives, unit testing, or defining “Done”, you can get easily overwhelmed by all the new and shiny ideas. It’s a real danger that implementing these new practices creates huge overheads, slows you down, and frustrates the team. They forget why you actually introduced agile [...]
Product development needs consistency The basic idea of Scrum is to create a safe and change-free environment to enable a team to concentrate on the planned development tasks. The team plans out a sprint of typically two weeks and the idea is that they work uninterrupted during this period. This process really helps to get [...]
Even today, in the 21st century, it’s rare for CEOs to steer their companies into agile waters. Change is hard, scary and leads into the unknown and changing an entire organization compounds all these fears. But, there are subtle, yet significant, ways in which you can organize your own work to be much more agile. [...]
In Scrum it’s clear, a product owner can’t change the acceptance criteria of a story in the current sprint without killing the sprint. Do you guys think the same principle should be applied in Kanban? I mean once a story has moved from a planning column and into an in-progress column, should the product owner [...]
