Probabilistic forecasting is an alternative to an estimates based approach. Rather than asking your teams to break down a lot of work up front, and then estimate it, we can use past data generated by the team from the work they’ve already done to extrapolate a forecast of what may happen… Read More »Probabilistic Forecasting
This weekend I set myself the objective of decorating my bathroom. I enlisted some help, took 2 days off and set about planning the work. The plan consisted of several goals: take the old tiles off the wall, remove the old shower, plaster where necessary, attach the new shower, tile… Read More »Responding to Change – A Decorator’s Story
The principles behind the agile manifesto are clear in their message on collaboration: “Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.” Yet, there are still companies out there where the visions of the development teams and business teams do not align. They either have different targets or they simply haven’t taken… Read More »Alignment a.k.a Collaboration
I’ve been attending stand ups for the better part of 10 years. I’ve been to some good ones, some bad ones and some really bad ones. More recently, I’ve been helping the teams I work with now, to get more value from them. We encouraged ourselves to think about what… Read More »Are You Getting Value From Stand Ups?
My last post: Testing is an activity, not a role, prompted a few comments on Twitter from my friends in the testing community. Most people didn’t think the post went far enough in explaining that although testing may indeed be an activity, it’s probably more than one activity, and that different activities… Read More »Software Development is a Team Sport
In traditional software development environments, testing may have been something that was outsourced. One group of people wrote the code and handed it off to a different team for testing. More recently, as the Principles of Agile were created and the Scrum framework in particular was popularised, cross functional teams… Read More »Testing is an activity, not a role
In western societies we read from left to right. We are conditioned to look to the top left first. During a recent stand up, a team member pointed out that our kanban board asks us to do almost the opposite. Our work is pulled from left to right. Those work items that are closest… Read More »Working Left to Right
To most of us, the problems with fixing cost, scope and time are obvious. How do we know we can deliver all of the scope, in the time we’ve been given, with the people we have to do it? The short answer, is that in most cases you can’t especially… Read More »Fixed Everything Projects
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools are supposed to make our lives easier. They provide a one stop shop where we can author and store requirements, manage bugs or issues, manage projects and even manage the build and release of software. Some of them even act as Source Code Management tools… Read More »Do ALM Tools Encourage Communication Waste?
Or is it? It’s not so much the act of estimation that’s the issue. Relative sizing can be a useful tool to help teams gain a shared understanding of a work item, and as a barometer for keeping batch size small. It’s what we do with those numbers afterwards that… Read More »To estimate, or not to estimate: That is the question.
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