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
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
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
Every day in our two-week sprint we start the day with a 15-minute scrum meeting in which all of the team members working on the sprint discuss our daily progress. I’ve been working with a fairly consistent team for close to two years and one question that sometimes comes up is who leads the team.… Continue reading Who leads the scrum team?
In my current firm we’ve been working with Agile for over six years. Our process has evolved as has our understanding of Agile methodologies. We started with six-week sprints, shortened them to two weeks, and are now talking about a move first to one-week sprints and then perhaps to continuous deployment (not to be confused… Continue reading A sprint in the life: Begin with the end in mind
Sometimes it is the supposedly little changes that introduce the largest problems into a project. An apparently small change to a requirement. A minor feature introduced at the end of a sprint. A slight tweak in the expected results. Often it is those outside the actual development team who introduce this small request, asking for… Continue reading Just a little change
InTruthItsNotThatSimple 