Matt Wynne taking it one tea at a time
BDD is powerful stuff, and it’s much more powerful when your product owner understands the benefits. We love having product owners at BDD Kickstart. The first day is all about the collaborative aspects of BDD where we learn how to break down and describe requirements using examples. We find that product owners really enjoy it. …
Continue reading “Bring your Product Owner to BDD Kickstart for free!”
I just got back from the fantastic Lean Agile Scotland conference, where I spoke about why agile fails. I’ve been doing a lot of travelling this year since The Cucumber Book came out, consulting and training different companies in BDD. A pattern I keep seeing are companies who adopted agile a few years ago but …
It’s funny, you’d think, from reading about planning poker that the purpose of this exercise is to come up with accurate estimates. I think that’s missing the point. The estimates are a useful by-product, if your organisation values such things, but actually the most important benefit you get from planning poker is the conversation. As …
If the only metric you use for measuring and forecasting your team’s progress is their iteration velocity, you’re missing out on a great deal of richer information that, for just a few extra minutes per day, you could easily be collecting. This is information that the team can use during the iteration to help spot …
I’m just back from this year’s XP Day, London. Thanks to everyone who came and packed out the room to hear Rob and I talking about our experiences evolving our team from Scrum to Kanban. The slides are here. There’s also a great transcript of the talk here on Tom Hume’s blog. Thanks Tom!
Last weekend I was at CITCON Europe, a great opportunity to meet some of the leading minds in the agile software movement. One intriguing new term I heard a few times was “value fetish”. Let me try to explain what I think it means, and discuss the implications for agile teams.
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. …
Continue reading “Where Scrum Gets Dangerous: Potentially Shippable? Make Sure You Mean It”
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 …
Karl Scotland has posted a great description of how his team solved some issues they were having within their Scrum team by moving over to using a lean-thinking or Kanban system, based on a short buffer or Queue of Minimum Marketable Features (MMFs). It’s probably the clearest explanation I’ve seen yet of why and how …
How important is it to measure how long something took? Well, so the received wisdom goes, by comparing how long it took you to complete your a task against the estimate you made before starting it, you get an idea of how good your estimate was. So far, so good. But what if your estimate …