Thought leaders in the US military are challenging traditional approaches to command and control. These military innovators are proposing a more fluid approach that allows simultaneous planning and execution. It is good to see they are catching up but as an Agile practitioner I already do fluid planning and execution.
Continue reading
Category Archives: Musing
Whose responsibility is testing anyway?
I have a painfully small manual test team, sometimes 1 tester per 15 developers. The answer to the obvious question “who tests?” is “mostly the developers”. Of course this only works if you’re doing extensive automated testing including Specification by Example with a tool such as Cucumber.
Continue reading
Cake Driven Development
I don’t know whether it is me or whether it is just people, but my teams tend to obsess about food. Particularly cake. Food entwines itself in the team culture. And that is why I think it is worth a blog post.
Continue reading
When Buckets Go Bad
I use the term Bucket Planning for Release Planning. The metaphor works because buckets overflow if overfilled. There are risks associated with Release buckets corresponding to Minimum Viable Products (MVP). A large MVP bucket has gone bad and a MVP Bucket that continues to grow is a Bucket gone really bad.
Continue reading
Cucumber: Who writes the Gherkin Scenarios
Gherkin, the language used in Cucumber to write tests, is meant to be understandable by folk from the business. I haven’t encountered product owners able to write their own scenarios. And I don’t trust either developers or testers to do it on their behalf. The only people I trust are business analysts trained to write and think Gherkin.
Continue reading
What to do when Scope is Fixed
Sally was a prospective customer of mine. She worked for a high profile but rather old school company and wanted a fixed price contract. Sally genuinely thought her business analysts had nailed down the scope and was confident nothing would change. From her perspective all I had to do was price the work and deliver the product. Sounds perfect except Sally was wrong. My experience is that, fixed price or not, scope is never fixed. Pretending nothing is going to change is a form of self-delusion. Sally was deluded. What should I have done?
Continue reading
Bucket Planning – Helpful Metaphor for Agile Release Planning
I sometimes call a Release Plan a Bucket Plan and the process Bucket Planning. I like the metaphor because if you overfill a bucket you end up with a mess on the floor – and the business gets that.
Continue reading
Glad Sad Mad Retrospectives
The guys at Agility in Mind (AIM) recently ran a retrospective for me. I thought their approach was cute and worth a quick post. They prompted the team for things that made them glad, sad and mad.
Continue reading
What is an Agile person?
Agile people have a propensity to seek improvements, are more willing to consider information that is at odds with preconceived notions, and are more willing to be different and take risks – at least according to David Alberts.
Continue reading
Which Gherkin Scenarios go in which Feature File
I believe that you should break the link between Gherkin files and the Epics / User Stories that triggered the Gherkin Scenarios. The Gherkin files should be organised in a way that usefully describes the evolving product. You need to accept that a User Story can affect Scenarios in multiple Gherkin files. Once the User Story is done you can and should forget about it. But the Gherkin Scenarios have a life long after the User Story is gone.