“We don’t have time for planning. We have to focus on delivery.”
I have heard this dozens of times from leaders of delivery teams who are struggling to meet expectations. It has always been well-intentioned, reasonable, and wrong.
An agile board (also known as a Task Board) gives a team an easy way to understand at a glance what they’ve committed to in a sprint and what progress… Read more »
When is a story done? When the developer is finished? When it passes QA? When the business signs off? When it’s scheduled for a release? When it’s checked in to… Read more »
The Agile Manifesto starts off with: We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. (Source: http://agilemanifesto.org/) And the 12 Principles behind it end with:… Read more »
Agile teams are defined in part by their rhythms – the set of meetings and events that the team holds. This is a starter set of rhythms to adopt; once you… Read more »
Sprint Planning is a regular meeting where the team comes together to select and commit to a set of work for the next Sprint. It should occur at the transition… Read more »
Acceptance Criteria are a key part of stories – they provide the guidance to let the team know when a given feature is complete according to the needs of the… Read more »
The purpose of estimating stories is to allow teams to understand their relative size and use that in Sprint Planning. Often, teams will use “points” rather than hours to emphasize… Read more »
Good user stories follow the INVEST model created by Bill Wake (http://xp123.com/articles/invest-in-good-stories-and-smart-tasks/). Independent – can be done on its own Negotiable – describes the outcome rather than the specific implementation… Read more »
Backlog Grooming is a regular meeting of the team, including Product Owner, Engineers, QA, and BA, to review the backlog. The purpose is to ensure that the backlog – the… Read more »