Work Item Tracking, to See or Not to See? This is always an interesting debate. The lists are much longer but for simplicity I’ve surfaced a few salient points. So which is best? Physical or virtual? For me physical boards win hands down, but there are occasionally good reasons for a careful blend.
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Tag Archives: agile
Did HeartOfAgile emerge from PDCA?
I don’t know if it was Alistair Cockburn’s inspiration but I’ve noticed a striking similarity between Cockburn’s HeartOfAgile and the plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle of TQM.
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Going back to basics with Agile, what would we find? The Heart of Agile
In a world with non-software Agile and Agile at scale, what is Agile? I think Alistair Cockburn has hit the nail right on the head with his recent HeartOfAgile.
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Quality is a choice: the case of the Next Generation Apps
Over the last year I’ve had the privilege of overseeing the development of the next generation of mobile apps (iOS and Android) for the major commercial radio brands in the UK. The most amazing thing about this experience was the priorities – UX&D was #1 priority – something I’ve never had before.
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What is the optimal number of manual testers in a development team? Zero?
To have manual testers, or not to have manual testers, that is the question. Typically I have one per team: Less than many teams but more than some organisations get away with.
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Delivery Manager – A new role for an Agile world
Rich Lewis is the best I’ve worked with. When I met him he was a Business Analyst who, on the sly, was Scrum Master of a small team. He was good at this but capable of much more. I invited him to be the Delivery Manager on the programme I was running at the time.
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Disruptive Innovation is an Illusion Hiding Efficiency
The way I see it disruptive innovation is an illusion to observers who have not had the same focus. From my experience that apparent disruptive innovation actually comes from companies who have invested and honed very tight, very frugal or cost effective product iterations on what is ultimately a predictable destination. In other words, to be truly innovative in a digital landscape you just need to be very efficient.
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Continuous Delivery by Default; Timeboxes by Exception
Once I used timeboxes by default. Now I relegate Sprints and such like to exception situations.
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Programmes can use more than one method: Kanban, Scrum, XP, BDD, etc
I have my preferences – Kanban and BDD – but don’t enforce these on my teams. That means I’ve got a couple of Scrum (ish) teams and teams that don’t use BDD. And I also have a bunch of people working in isolation – I just leave them to it.
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Product Owner – leader, facilitator or unnecessary overhead?
Daniel Markham thinks the Product Owner is “the perfect scam in the Agile community” and recommends getting rid of the role. This might work for highly functioning teams working in highly functioning organisations, but for not normal teams. For normal teams in normal organisations the Product Owner performs a valuable role as a facilitator and, if you are lucky, a leader.
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