“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
Recently I spent ninety minutes with our full development and product teams listening to a series of two minute pitches on ideas for our quarterly ‘hack week’ event. As a company we’ve been doing this for the past few years – setting aside one week every quarter for our development team to explore ideas and… Continue reading Fostering innovation
In my previous career people used to tell me that once I got started talking about a subject it was hard to get me to stop. If I opened my mouth to explain something that I was passionate about it you could expect that it would take about 25 minutes for me to stop talking… Continue reading Simplicity in life
Having already posted my two-part blog on the Agile principle of simplicity I now find myself in the position of offering my third posting on this topic. And of course the third piece of my two-part blog has me thinking about my favorite four-part trilogy (check it out: http://amzn.to/10lCbUS). Here I want to focus on… Continue reading Simplicity and saying ‘no’
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
InTruthItsNotThatSimple 