Jim Highsmith proposed two simple strategies for successful software development: Build Less, Start Sooner.
Jim’s observation is genius, but I would add “Innovate Constantly”.
Continue reading
Tag Archives: agile
What do I do When Tasks in the Sprint Plan are not Finished?
This is what having a large number of tasks unfinished at end of Sprint looks like:
Not pretty.
It is best to avoid over commitment so the answer to “What do I do When Tasks in the Sprint Plan are not Finished?” is to lower your expectations next time you go into planning. Using Scrum language you should ensure the team only commit to what is achievable, and that is obviously less than they thought was possible the last time around.
You’ve also got to tidy the up the mess left by the previous Sprint. Have a look at the unfinished tasks and decide if they are necessary for your high priority user stories. If so, then schedule them into the next Sprint. If not, then forget about them.
Finally, you have to decide what credit you can give yourself, i.e. what velocity you earned in the previous Sprint. Personally I start hard line about this. You can only claim a user story if it is completed, so you can only add the story points for that user story if all the tasks have been completed. No partial credit.
Having said that:
- If you find that the unfinished tasks are actually unnecessary then you can claim credit for the whole user story.
- It is sometimes possible to split a user story into meaningful sub-parts. If one of the sub-parts has been completed then you can claim the story points of the sub-part for velocity
This post is part of my What do I do When … ? series. Please drop me a line or add a comment if you’ve got a question you’d like answered.
Continuous Delivery is Inevitable
Continuous delivery gives the capability to identify a requirement, code a solution, test it, and release it within a few hours. As I see it continuous delivery will become the norm amongst software companies. I think the trend is inevitable.
Continue reading
Three Options When the Boss Changes Priorities Mid-Sprint
So your boss comes to you mid-sprint and demands a new oscillating-email-ingest-engine. Right now. Nothing else is higher priority.
Scrum says “Say no”. I think the discussion is more nuanced.
Continue reading
Rugby is a Better Analogy for Agile Delivery than the Scrum
This post is partly about the game of rugby and partly about the agile method called Scrum. Although I’ve a lot of experience with Agile approaches to software development, including Scrum, I must confess that my experience of rugby is limited to watching the All Blacks during the Rugby World Cup. Despite that caveat the theme of this post is that rugby is a better analogy for agility than Scrum is.
Continue reading
Use a WIP Limit During a Sprint to Avoid the Cataract of Stealth
Mike Lowery – a fantastic Scrum coach – has written a post called It might look like rapids, but it’s still a waterfall. This is part of Mike’s series on Scrum coaching patterns (or team anti-patterns) and in this post he concentrates on the “The Cataract of Stealth”.
Mike starts by outlining how a sprint should look: “you should see a sort of tag team effect where 1 or 2 stories are in flight, as they get close to being finished the next stories are kicked off”. In contrast “The Cataract of Stealth” means the team start too many user stories at the same time thus risking finishing any of the user stories at the end of the sprint. Often this is caused by team imbalance, e.g.. too many developers for the number of testers.
The cataract of stealth is a real problem and I recommend people have a look at Mike’s post for more detail including his very sensible solutions. (It also has shades of the Overcommitment Bear Trap.)
I just want to add one thing. What Mike’s post highlighted for me was a (small) convergence of Scrum and Lean/Kanban thinking. The constraint on having “1 or 2 stories” in flight during a sprint is work in progress (WIP) constraint – a concept straight from Lean/Kanban.
A Lean-Agile Perspective at the Project Research Institute (part 2)
Last year I wrote a series of blog posts for the Project Research Institute of Athabascau University in Canada. As I mentioned before the PMI’s aim was to introduce their relatively mainstream audience to an Agile perspective. My aim was to show how the principles and practices of Lean-Agile Software Development offer creative solutions to general project challenges.
The PMI has now published all of my posts, including:
Is Software Craftsmanship a Type of Martial Arts?
Code Kata, Coding Dojos, and White Belt Programmers. What is it all about?
In part seven of my series on software craftsmanship I have a look at how software craftsmanship is sometimes wrapped in the language of martial arts.
I confess from the outset that the use of martial arts language really put my off software craftsmanship. But behind the kung-fu I found fairly uncontroversial practices.
I’ll have a quick look at the three software craftsmanship practices I found with a strong martial arts flavour: Code Kata, Coding Dojos, and White Belt Programmers. Then go into a more general discussion of what it is about.
Continue reading
Nine Common Strategies for Managing a Growing Defect Backlog
In response to my request for questions along the lines of what do I do when … ? Jo asked:
What do I do when the defect backlog keeps growing with low impact (and low priority) defects and nobody seems to pay attention to them as we have more important features (or medium/high) priority defects to deal with? Should we deal with it or just stop logging low impact defects?
Faults are an inevitable part of software delivery. I only briefing touched on managing lists of faults in Agile Project Execution so it is well worth expanding on.
In fact defects is an area where software delivery, including agile software development, can get messy. Luckily there are ways to manage this mess or to avoid it altogether. Jo’s question hints at potential answers but there are others. In fact I know of at least nine common strategies for managing a growing fault list.
Continue reading
What do I do When … ?
A few years back I did a big agile roll out and I asked people for a list of the things which might upset the agile software delivery process. Although I asked for Agile Gotchas the team actually came up with was a set of questions on "What do I do when … ?".
I’ve answered many of these questions in my big articles on Agile Project Management but I’ve decided to put a bit more focus on them. So, in a new series of monthly posts, I’ll answer questions on the theme of What do I do When.
I have some questions in mind but I would also welcome other questions along the lines of What do I do When … ?. If you’ve got a suggestion please drop me a line or add a comment.