Halfway Pregnant
Categories:
agile
Categories: agile
I'm working with a client that's adopting agile. One thing they've done is build their own agile PM tool. It's not bad, but not as good as Rally or VersionOne. One thing the tool allows is to assign user stories to the "front burner" or "back burner" with the idea that if it's on the back burner, you get to it if you have time...but you still assign it to an iteration. From an agile perspective, I think this is a bad idea. Iteration planning is about getting the team to commit to the work of the iteration. A story is either in or out. This tool allows you to put a story somewhere in between. It's assigned to the iteration, but it doesn't show up in your story point count or the standard view of the story board. The product owner may think it's in, but the team can easily forget about, leading to disappointment when the iteration is over. It's important to have transparency across the project. The product owner and team need to be on the same page without any ambiguity about what may be in or out of scope for the iteration. |
Beginning the Agile Journey
Categories:
agile
Categories: agile
I was with a client this week that was just starting their agile journey. They had been through the training and knew the basics, but watching one of their stand-ups made me think about how green I was when I first started doing agile. |
Trying to be Agile - first post
Categories:
agile
Categories: agile
I came up with the idea for this blog while listening to a presentation by Dave Prior at Agile 2014. He was talking about our agile journey and how do we know when we get there. The reality is, we don’t really get there, we continue on a path. As an example, I've been working with a client that thinks they're doing agile but the reality is they're not really being agile. They put some practices in place that are agile-like but the actual mindset hasn’t really settled in. For example, they are writing user stories but for every user story they write a use case that's a very detailed requirement. They are writing this all up before the first iteration planning session, so in essence they’re still planning a waterfall method but just using user stories. I think one of the reasons they reached this point is that at some point a couple years ago they were trained on agile but after the training they started following some of these practices without really understanding the principles behind them. As time went on they started to drift back towards some of their waterfall practices and without continued coaching and mentoring they drifted farther away from being agile. Whether we’re looking at our individual path or an organizational one, agile is about inspecting and adapting. Frameworks like Scrum might be a good starting point, but we need to continue to adapt those practices to fit our needs. We need to continue to ask “How can I do this better?” |