Every organization has to deal with a mix of ongoing and project oriented work. But, even if you structure your teams into departments to optimize ongoing work, they keep trying to self organize into project focused teams.
agile development process
Currently, I’m preparing for teaching my next course on Agile Methodology. Again and again, I wonder what is the single most important thing my students should be able to take with them after four full days. One of my core messages is definitely that agile is more about principles than about practices. If you absorb [...]
Today I spent the whole day debugging an elusive concurrency problem in ruby on rails running on JRuby. We start some threads during the web request and, usually sooner than later, all our database connections are blocked. Getting deep into the details of multithreading, connection pooling and the like is nothing I enjoy doing. Especially [...]
We’re using PivotalTracker as our agile planning tool. It’s great for maintaining a backlog of prioritized user stories and managing the flow of stories within an iteration. We’re really happy with it. But recently a new requirement came up: How can we manage our bigger features? How can we make sure all the stories we [...]
Last week, the CTO of a partner company came over to me and asked: “Hey Matthias, do you have any benchmarks on how many commits your developers do each day? And how many lines of code they produce? I would love to compare the performance of our teams to be able to show my CEO [...]
The final building block of our introduction to agile is velocity. In addition to employing user stories to break down big features into manageable junks, maintaining a backlog for ruthless prioritizing, and story point estimates, velocity will help you find out what you can deliver in a week.
Estimation of Development Time is Hard After discussing which issues we tried to solve by introducing agile practices to manage a remote development team, using User Stories to be able to compare requirements and building a Backlog for ruthless prioritizing I want to share our learnings about agile estimation of User Stories. As you might [...]
So far, I’ve talked about how I went for Introducing agile practices to manage a remote development team as well as User Stories – Making Sure Your Customers Get The First-class Seats. While User Stories are a good start, enforcing ruthless prioritization of these stories can really streamline your development processes. Priorities get mixed up [...]
In my last post about Introducing Agile Practices to Manage a Remote Development Team I described the issues we faced with our existing development process and provided a step-by-step overview of the agile practices we implemented. In this post, I want to introduce you to the concept of User Stories and how you can use [...]
What would you say if I told you that you can double multiply the output of your development team while simultaneously increasing quality? Let me show you how I made this happen in a small team a couple of months ago. When I joined autoplenum.de in October 2007, roughly 10 months after its founding, “phase [...]
