Story points and velocity are probably the most well known tools for estimation in Agile environments. They are the basis for predictability with Scrum. To begin with, we should be clear on what a story point is. Most people reading this will have heard at least one definition, and probably more… Read More »Story Points & Velocity (with Planning Poker)
Although we don’t favour revolutionary changes, most of us first experience agile through a radical and wholesale transformation to Scrum. Along with all the changes to roles, meetings and working approach, we find ourselves bombarded with new terminology. Two terms that seem to confuse many newbies (and not-so-newbies) are incremental… Read More »A new game
I’ve always been a believer that, rather than focusing on scaling agile, you should just focus on being Agile. However, over the last few years, a number of frameworks have emerged with the aim of ‘scaling’ Agile. SAFe and LeSS are two such examples of scaling frameworks. Scrum.org has now… Read More »Scaled Scrum is just Scrum
“What makes trees special? They live long and grow large by being mostly dead. Only about 2% of tree cells are alive” ~ @biotweeps When I saw this, I immediately thought of Product Backlogs. I have heard a number of people admonish an audience with statements such as “50% of most… Read More »Is your backlog like a tree?
It’s time to throw out that Christmas CD. Seriously, I don’t want to listen to Lennon’s So This Is Christmas ever again. The alternative? Our tongue-in-cheek agile and lean-related playlist. It was born during lunch at this year’s Kanban retreat in Lisbon. Even Flow by Pearl Jam was an early… Read More »Scrum & Kanban playlist
As Jeff Sutherland finished describing how important the burndown chart had been in the creation of Scrum, I started feeling guilty for my previous attacks [on burndowns, not on Jeff]. But then I started thinking of examples of how burndowns can easily fail to reflect reality. Even if we ignore… Read More »Burndown versus CFD
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
How good are your retrospectives? Could they be better? Do you have the opportunity to watch other teams’ retros? Is there someone who you can invite to critique your meetings? During my time at Net-A-Porter, I was lucky enough to work with some excellent people and we helped each other… Read More »Retro: The Movie
The Agile and Lean communities love an acronym, but will settle for an initialism if they have to. For clarification, an acronym is when a word is formed from the initial letters of words in a phrase, and is then pronounced as a separate word (for example, BAFTA or WYSIWYG).… Read More »Acronym Quiz
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