Agile developers know how to estimate story points for customer features. And while transferring this knowledge over to the project team can take a few sprints, it is speedily adopted and velocity becomes a focal point of the sprint planning games. But, if the all the project participants aren’t officially on the team, a growing [...]
user stories
Cross-dysfunctional Teams and the Story Point Fight
by Dan Ackerson on November 17, 2011 · 1 comment
How to translate “business value” of things that are technically important
by Matthias Marschall on April 19, 2011 · 3 comments
Agile teams often struggle with purely technical tasks. They just don’t know how to translate technical necessity into business value. This makes it difficult to prioritize technical tasks against User Stories. In this article, I want to show you how to transform the hidden value of technical tasks into visible business value to ease prioritization [...]
How Digital Agile Management Tools Make You Blind (And How A Physical Kanban Board Can Help You See Again)
by Matthias Marschall on March 15, 2011 · 4 comments
We’ve been using PivotalTracker for years to manage our agile software development process. It works like a charm for us. Whenever an idea comes up, we enter it into Tracker as an Epic (no matter how rough and abstract it might be). When the time comes to start implementing it, we usually break it down [...]
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 [...]
“Done” is the Wrong Measure of Success
by Matthias Marschall on September 11, 2009 · 0 comments
It’s a very important thing for any agile team to find a definition of Done, which fits the expectations and the environment of the current development. For User Stories, I definitely prefer Done = Released as the most helpful metric. Only if a story is really out there serving users can you truly forget about [...]
Estimation of User Stories With Story Points as Abstract Size Measure
by Matthias Marschall on August 7, 2008 · 3 comments
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 have experienced, estimating the time required [...]
