“Our team is going Agile,” “where are you on your Agile journey,” and “what is the most important Agile metric,” might be some things you’ve heard or thought about lately. The answers to these and the many other questions or descriptions I’ve heard in my adventures across the enterprise have been at times confusing, at […]
As I mentioned in a previous post, Agile was started by a widespread group of individuals who saw the way things were and weren’t working and began to creatively break the rules to get better results. Of course, Agile has grown in the decades since. It’s started to resemble a detailed set of rules for […]
Crossing the threshold of agility I remember the first time I experienced a team crossing that subtle threshold of discovering the power of working together as a group, with transparency and trust, rather than a collection of individuals working alone on a common project. I recall the energy that was unlocked as people gradually let […]
The purpose of Sprint/Iteration Planning is for a team to identify and commit to the total amount of work they think they can to accomplish within a 2 week period. In order to have a successful Sprint Planning meeting, there needs to be an organized, prioritized backlog with a sufficient amount of stories in a […]
Anyone who has created a truly Agile result at any level of any organization can speak to the elegance of how everything fits together, how information flows, and the way in which actions taken at the smallest task level both impact and are directly informed by everything taking place at larger or higher levels. The […]
The goal of the Definition of DONE agreement is many fold, and it exists not only to create a standard by which teams can operate so that they can feel confident that when someone says, “I’m DONE!” they know precisely what that means, but also to ensure that all involved stakeholders understand when, why, and […]
Read More… from What is a Definition of DONE, and why do we need one?
In order for the team to review the work done in the previous Sprint/Iteration, a Sprint/Iteration Review is held. Note that this is not the occasion for the team to present the work to the Product Owner. This Review meeting should be scheduled for the first available time slot after the end of the previous […]
Many new agile teams attempt to create stories by architectural layer: one story for the UI, another for the database, etc. This may satisfy Small requirement, but it fails at Independent and Valuable (as part of the Bill Wake’s INVEST model). Typically, large User Stories can be split using several of patterns. Here are two […]
These next couple of posts will take things down to the most basic of Agile requirements: the User Story. A User Story is a tool used in the Agile development methodology to capture a description of functionality from an end-user perspective. The user story describes the type of user, what they want and why. It […]