On agile projects, different teams can have different definitions of effort when estimating work. It is one reason why velocity can vary greatly on teams whose productivity is similar. It is also why using a story point value of zero can prove helpful in planning. Here are three scenarios when the practice makes sense.
Stop counting test cases and bug reports in development! They aren’t as helpful as you might think, and there is no direct correlation between these counts and delivered value or quality.
Teams will say that they need to learn how to say "no" more often. Actually, they need to learn ways to decline requests in a positive, productive manner. Here are five recommendations for teams to both properly support their stakeholders while also defending their own productivity.
Our webinar Scaling Agile Metrics and Measuring what Matters with Sally Elatta was a hit. Here she offers advice based on your questions that she was unable to address during the session.
How might efforts to "scale agile" and apply its self-organizing principles to the development of increasingly complex solutions impact the project management discipline? Two key challenges are identified: the purposeful avoidance of the project manager role and favoring stable, persistent teams over temporary organizations.
As Kanban is applied to longer projects up to three months in duration, the principles of visibility, flow, variability and improvement are still in full effect, but challenges must be taken into account, including larger teams and higher-level sponsors, increased uncertainty and complexity, and, by extension, greater organizational pressures.
Too many organizations confuse doing agile with being agile. They force adoption through command-and-control thinking combined with predictive planning. That won’t work. In this series of excerpts from their new book, Craig Larman and Bas Vodde share best practices for adopting and scaling lean and agile development.
When approaches work well, it is natural to want to replicate them. However, scaling a process is not as easy as saying “Do more of it!” Here, we examine some strategies and anti-patterns for successful scaling.
Scenarios and storyboards are great tools to describe how users interact with a product. They also complement user stories by helping to explore risk, discover new user stories, and capture the relationship between stories. Here is a primer on what these tools are, and how they can be used in an agile context.
The approach to scope changes used within the agile/Scrum framework provides a stable environment so the development team can focus on getting work “done.” Frequent feedback about the product allows for less upfront planning and means the Scrum team can quickly adapt to changes. Delivering business value early and often results in increased customer satisfaction.
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"I do not know anyone who has got to the top without hard work. That is the recipe. It will not always get you to the top, but should get you pretty near." - Margaret Thatcher |
