Tired of estimating? Try the goat!

Are you tired of estimating all the time but not ready to go all the way to #noestimates? Let the estimation goat do all the hard work of guessing for you.

Continue reading

My Journey towards Becoming an Agile Driver

A car turned over in the road.

What’s an Agile Driver? I have always been driving kind of ad hoc. Getting from A to B with no particular plan. If I were a programmer you would call it “cowboy coding” but I’m not, so we can call it “cowboy driving”. People, everyone it seemed — my boss,…

Continue reading

Agile Estimation Units

Coffee cups as agile estimation units.

Which agile estimation units should you use? You can use any arbitrary units to estimate backlog items in an agile project. It does not matter if you do your estimation with story points, ping pong balls, man days, man hours, kLoCs. After a while your teams will converge on a…

Continue reading

A Waterfall is Fine – for Watching

As humans we love the majesty of nature. Who can fail to be impressed by such majestic cataracts as the Niagara falls or the Victoria falls? Someone said that falling is fine, it is hitting the ground that kills you. Same thing with the water in the waterfall. When it hits the end, enormous chaos is generated both visibly as spume and invisibly in the water.

Hydroelectric Power

We do not usually try riding a waterfall in a barrel. We can harness it for electric power. But if we do, we certainly do not want to ride it in a barrel.

Agile is also a Waterfall

Two pipes, one with laminar, one with turbulent flow as in a waterfall.Source: University of Cambridge

Laminar versus turbulent flow. Image reused from http://www.ceb.cam.ac.uk/pages/mass-transport.html .

Agile software development methodologies are about breaking the waterfall into safe, manageable steps. The impact is not saved for the end in a big bang delivery. Instead it is taken one step at a time. The water does not flow as chaotically. It is more like a laminar flow.

Un-Agile Manifesto – when you hate agile

The so called Agile Manifesto has created so much excitement in the software development world and beyond. But for all those who got their life ruined by agile, for all those who oppose Agile methods in software development — it is time they got their own manifesto. Here it is…

Continue reading

Agile Team Staffing

A penjing or bonsai forest in potted plants. Beautiful and serene, yes. But is it strong?

Agile team staffing is about staffing your agile teams and managing the talents of the teams not just the people. So, how do you create agile teams where the members trust each other? Keeping the same teams over a longer period will help teams develop transactive memory and trust. But…

Continue reading

Agile Offshoring in Practice

How is Agile offshoring done in practice? Julian Bass studied seven different companies doing off-shoring London-Bengaluru. He had expected that the companies would have adapted a continuum of practices from Scrum and XP. Findings about Agile Offshoring To his surprise he found that this was not true. Instead, all of…

Continue reading

Cross-Breeding Lean and Agile

Joe Dager from the Business 901 blog and podcast is someone who has covered the cross-breeding of lean and agile more than most people. So how does one apply Lean to agile software development? Wang, Conboy and Cawley examined thirty experience reports and came to the following conclusion: Lean concepts,…

Continue reading

Waterfall got it right… almost

I am not going to write a lot on waterfall versus agile but… An interesting point that is worth reiterating. Waterfall software development processes can remind us of many of the important steps in software development. The difference is not so much in what we do as in how, when and what order.

Agile and the User Experience

Argazkiak.org | CodeSyntax usability lab © cc-by-sa: garaolaza Above and beyond all other things Agility is about scheduling and re-scheduling. Achieving that requires many things such as high quality, finishing one thing before you start on the next etc but above and beyond the items to be scheduled need to…

Continue reading