I recently heard someone at my firm lodge the following complaint about Agile: ‘The trouble with developing software with Agile is that it tends to be very reactive as we build to satisfy the most recent requests; instead we need a more proactive and long-term approach to thinking about our software development priorities.’ To offer… Continue reading The Agile planning onion
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?
As I refocus on trying to blog more regularly about life as a Product Owner in an Agile software development organization, I want to start out with a set of posts on the topic I planned to write about in the fall as I wound down my series on velocity. I planned to start my… Continue reading An Agile plan to write about planning in Agile
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
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 wrote recently about sustainable development and wanted to follow this up with a piece focused around something we’ve been talking about a lot on the project teams I serve as a product owner: how can we understand and increase our velocity? Velocity is about the productivity of the development team and this can be… Continue reading Understanding velocity in product development
Over the past few months as I have been writing broadly about ‘Agility’ I have been interweaving my reflections on the Agile Principles with my thoughts about some of the specific development issues we face as a firm. As I wrap up this loose series and prepare for the next arc of blog entries about… Continue reading 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
InTruthItsNotThatSimple 