Thoughts and conversation from our nomads.
Release sprints
To get our code to production what is left to do is to turn the "potentially" releasable product into a releasable product. To do this a number of activities are required: Which ones and how much effort they require varies greatly between types of organisation. The fastest way to perform rollout ac...
On Acceptance criteria for user stories
One of the teams I have recently coached quickly got a grasp of how to phrase user stories but found it hard to relate to the concept of acceptance criteria. I wrote this short FAQ as an attempt to make it easier for my team to work with acceptance criteria and hope that other teams might find this...
How story points work
One of my clients is a small software development house that does custom development in the form of development projects for clients . I helped them to successfully introduce Agile (Scrum with XP) and both the team and business managers are really happy with it. As they liked our methods of plannin...
When the red bus hits: Agile when things go wrong
There’s a saying in software development “If someone gets hit by the red bus ... “ which roughly translates to that if you lose a project team member or two you still want to be able to get the work done and finish the project. Normally, red busses are rare: The realistic worst case scenario is...
How to pick a Scrum team
I was recently asked by a friend how to pick an Agile team. My friend is a project manager within a New Zealand government department and to deliver an important project he was given complete freedom of choice with regards to project methodology and people. He chose Agile and Scrum as a delivery fr...
When not to run Agile
People keep asking me whether I’d run all projects using an agile framework such as Scrum. When I answer “of course not” they often not only expect but gently try to steer me towards an answer that excludes certain type of projects: “You certainly wouldn’t use it for a mission critical system, woul...
Design chunking in Scrum
When I started with agile (Scrum) software development five years ago one of the main challenges I faced was combining an agile development approach with user-experience driven website design. Especially, as we were working on a global, consumer-oriented web site with a strong focus on product bran...