Tea-Driven Development

Scrum tells you to build ‘potentially shippable’ changes to your product (let’s call them ‘User Stores’) in fixed-length iterations. By estimating the relative complexity of delivering each of these changes using arbitrary units (let’s call them ‘Story Points’) you can measure how much estimated complexity was turned into ‘potentially shippable’ software over a fixed duration.

So far, so good. Where could it possibly go wrong?

Continue Reading »

Hmph. I just discovered Markdown which makes a great partner to the TextMate Blogging Bundle, but my recent markdown-formatted posts don’t seem to be appearing on the homepage of my blog…

Anyone know what’s going on?

A while back I alerted you to a post Karl Scotland had written on his implementation of a kanban system for producing software. Kenji Hiranabe has posted a very informative and well-researched article on the InfoQ website which also sheds a great deal of light on the practical application of this exciting emerging practice. Well worth a read if you’re open to fresh ideas on how to get stuff done.

I facilitated our regular end-of-iteration retrospective last week, and although the feedback from the team was positive, I was left with a feeling that something wasn’t right.

With our second major live release looming large on the horizon, I focussed the session on the theme of ‘Success’. My aim was to give the team a blueprint for a successful iteration to keep in mind when things were tough, and to help ensure that we were all pulling in the same direction by agreeing as a team what constitutes success for us.

Continue Reading »