Many companies operate with a project-based focus. When a new project is authorized, often times a new team is created to work on that project. Frequently the members of this new team may have limited prior experience working with one another. In those cases, we have to…
Many organizations find that when they start to adopt agile at scale (i.e., agile with more than a single team), their team structures need to change. In particular, companies that have historically relied on a large number of component teams as opposed to feature teams…
Ever been on a project where you needed someone (a specialist) outside of your agile development team to do work for you? For example, I once worked with a team that was developing a medical software application and frequently needed legal specialists to draft or review…
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…