In my last post I began talking about the Agile principle of simplicity (“Simplicity – the art of maximizing the amount of work not done – is essential”) and the approach that salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff advocated for building their software, “fast, simple, and right the first time.” I wrote about the hard work of… Continue reading Simplicity and Agile
Coming off of my ‘sprint in the life’ mini-series of daily blogging for two weeks, I was very tempted to write this next post on the Agile principle of sustainable development (because I can assure you that any longer than two weeks of daily blogging is not sustainable for me). But something I was reading… Continue reading The art of simplicity
This morning in scrum we did three things: confirm that all of our tickets were ready to deploy (that is, we reviewed the work we had done and made sure everything was tested and prepared for this weekend’s rollout), conduct a retrospective on this sprint (that is, we talked together about what went well, what… Continue reading Full circle
Today (which is day nine of a ten-day sprint) we had our eighth UAT or user-acceptance testing session. We have these sessions almost every day of the sprint, allowing the testers and the product owner (and usually the designer as well) to look together at the features and fixes being developed by the coders. This… Continue reading Frequent acceptance testing
I’ve been focusing these ‘sprint in the life’ posts on one of the projects that I work on as a product owner. I am part of two other sprint teams as well, and we as a company have several other projects going on simultaneously that other product owners are involved with. The team of product… Continue reading Connecting with other teams
We are just past the halfway point in this sprint and so one of the things I am doing as the product owner is to review our sprint goals to see how much of what we planned to do will actually get finished this sprint. Doing this review brings up two topics I want to… Continue reading Halfway through the sprint
I’ve focused the past few posts on how we dealt with a major obstacle this sprint, writing about how Agile processes helped us both to catch the problem and to address it successfully. We’ve reworked our approach to the feature set and are now back to making good progress on development. But this issue isn’t… Continue reading Focus behind the scenes
I wrote yesterday about the problem we crashed into this sprint when we discovered that designs for one major feature we were building had failed to consider two important user personas, had worked off of an inadequately articulated user story, and had been conceptualized by one team while being built by a slightly different one. … Continue reading Mid-course correction – addressing an issue
One of the core principles of Agile is this: “Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.” The ability to respond nimbly to new information is a hallmark of Agile (in my opinion) and part of what makes it such a good approach to use when developing… Continue reading Mid-course correction – finding an issue
Do you remember the game ‘telephone’ that you might have played as a kid? Someone starts with a message that they whisper into the ear of the person next to them, then that person whispers as much as they can remember of that same message to the next person in line, and so on until… Continue reading A global team
InTruthItsNotThatSimple 