Groucho Marx once famously observed that outside of a dog a book is a man’s best friend while inside of a dog it’s too dark to read. We could use a similar analogy to talk about Agile planning and say that good planning does not happen in a vacuum because either it’s too dark, cramped,… Continue reading When worlds collide
It has been a little while since I’ve been in a good rhythm with my blogging but I am trying to get to one now. I want to work through the remaining posts in the current arc about Agile planning. Believe it or not I work hard to keep my blog posts concise. I think… Continue reading Summary on my next two posts
If you follow me on Twitter (@asbiv) or if you read a post I made to my blog last week, you may have noticed that I recently started reading The Emperor’s Handbook by Marcus Aurelius, a Roman Emperor and a Stoic. When writing about the ways that people ‘abuse their souls’ Aurelius decries those whose… Continue reading What’s so hard about Agile planning?
Over my last few posts (back in the fall) I talked about understanding and improving the velocity or productivity of a project team. The idea of achieving a sustainable and rapid development pace can be complicated by many factors but hopefully the ideas I wrote about in the past few entries have been useful in… Continue reading How new ideas impact the sprint team
It’s hard for me to believe that 2013 is over and a new year has begun. The last half of 2013 flew by and kept me incredibly busy professionally. We’ve been aggressively developing and marketing two products on which I have been working as the Product Owner, which has meant a fair amount of time… Continue reading Are you still out there?
I have been writing in the past two posts about finding and maintaining a sustainable development pace flowing out of reflections on the following Agile principle: “Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.” I’ve written about understanding and measuring velocity and about the… Continue reading Finding a sustainable development pace
I mentioned in my last post that I wanted at some point to share more of my thoughts about using prototypes when developing highly complex software solutions. While the ideas are fresh in my mind I wanted to write some about this now. When I talk about prototypes I do not mean the first ‘beta’… Continue reading Prototypes for complex software
One of the things I want to do in this loosely structured set of blog posts about Agility (or living out the principles of Agile) is to respond to ideas I am learning from other blogs and articles. I hope this helps point some of you to good resources out there for learning about product… Continue reading Key questions to ask
“Why did you close all my issue tickets?” The lead tester on one my projects asked me this question recently, partly in jest and partly out of some frustration. In a three-day period I closed 100 open tickets in the system we use to track software bugs, feature enhancements, and development tasks, and the tester… Continue reading Grooming the backlog
With the Major League Baseball All-star game coming up I’ve been thinking about MVPs. But probably not the way you’re thinking of. Instead of wondering who the most valuable player will be for the American and National leagues, I’m thinking about minimum viable products. In the software development world, the concept of a minimum viable… Continue reading Looking for the MVP
InTruthItsNotThatSimple 