These days I spend more and more of my time with executives in companies that are doing larger-scale agile adoptions. As trusted stewards of their companies’ resources these executives are rightfully interested in knowing how best to measure the success of their…
The definition of done is a checklist of the types of work that the team is expected to successfully complete by the end of the sprint, before it can declare its work to be potentially shippable. A team’s definition of done should be determined before it does its first…
During sprint execution, it’s the development team’s responsibility to manage the flow of work to meet the sprint goal. One important flow-related decision a self-organizing team must make is how many product backlog items the team should work on in parallel to maximize…
Sprints (or iterations if you prefer) are rooted in the concept of timeboxing, a time-management technique that helps organize the performance of work and manage scope. Each sprint takes place in a timeframe with specific start and end dates, called a timebox. Inside…
During my client work I am frequently presented with a description of some approach a team or organization is taking when applying agile. I am then often asked for my opinion on that approach. I most frequently respond by asking the following question: “How’s that…
Nearly every week, an agile team will ask me, When should we create and update our development documentation?
For example, I recently taught a class for a company that is developing a medical device and its surrounding software ecosystem. It was a diverse class that…
Many practitioners write user stories using the familiar template shown below:
The first slot in this template is for the user role, representing the class of individuals that receive the benefit provided by achieving the goal of the story. In a previous blog post I…
If you choose to write user stories to represent your product backlog items, how much detail should be associated with each story’s conditions of satisfaction?
Before I answer that question, let’s make sure we agree on our terms. As I describe in my…
Agile teams write user stories to express the desired business value for many types of product backlog items, especially features.
One common format for user stories is:
This simple user story format helps teams craft well-written stories that business people and…
Are software estimations useful? I say yes, but perhaps not for the reason you might expect. To me the principal value of estimating is the discussion among the team members that takes place when they try to agree on a size. Honestly, I am less interested in the size…