Articles tagged “agile”

• Process purists and productivity · Picky about methodology Re­cent­ly, I found [an old ques­tion][1] from 2011 on Pro­gram­mers.SE. The orig­i­nal poster ex­plained a prob­lem his team has when us­ing Scrum, and asked for ad­vice. From his ques­tion, it also ap­peared that he's not ac­tu­al­ly us­ing Scrum, but rather…
  productivity 36 agile 10
• Taking hostages with Waterfall It is ear­ly sum­mer, year 2013. A com­pa­ny I was work­ing for starts a new pro­ject sched­uled for re­lease in Sep­tem­ber. A few days ear­li­er, the pro­ject man­ag­er de­ter­mines that the pro­ject should take…
  management 34 agile 10 communication 27
• Brooks's law in Agile projects I was re­cent­ly asked whether [Brook's law][1] ap­plies to Ag­ile pro­jects as well. By Ag­ile pro­jects, the per­son ask­ing the ques­tion means ac­tu­al, real Ag­ile pro­jects, the ones where can­cel­ing a pro­ject and re­sum­ing it sev­er­al months lat­er with a…
  management 34 agile 10 short 50
• Visual management I dis­cov­ered [Vi­su­al man­age­ment blog][1] in 2013. Al­though I al­ready heard about Kent Beck's Big Vis­i­ble Chart, I've nev­er ac­tu­al­ly seen vi­su­al man­age­ment in prac­tice be­fore. For me, tick­ets went straight to Fog­Bugz or TFS and re­mained there,…
  featured 8 management 34 agile 10 productivity 36 communication 27 workplace 7 backlog 2
• Control Hu­man be­ings want to con­trol every­thing. Their lives, oth­er peo­ple, things around them, events which can af­fect them in any way. The il­lu­sion of con­trol gives them cer­tain­ty, the feel­ing of or­der, the…
  thoughts 6 short 50 management 34 agile 10
• Visual management and the everlasting tasks Near­ly a year ago, I de­scribed how I im­ple­ment­ed vi­su­al man­age­ment in my com­pa­ny. My us­age of vi­su­al man­age­ment re­mained rough­ly the same, but over time, I dis­cov­ered one as­pect I wasn't think­ing of when I wrote the orig­i­nal ar­ti­cle: the tasks which…
  short 50 management 34 agile 10 workspace 1 communication 27
• Questioning the goal of the project Re­cent­ly, a friend of mine ap­proached me with a rewrite of a soft­ware prod­uct. A small com­pa­ny where she works has a small piece of desk­top soft­ware writ­ten ten years ago in WinDe­v¹ by an in-house de­vel­op­er left five years ago. The pur­pose of this…
  requirements 3 agile 10 communication 27 short 50
• A bug or a change? A fea­ture is de­liv­ered to a cus­tomer. The cus­tomer com­plains that some­thing doesn't be­have as ex­pect­ed and cre­ates a tick­et in a bug track­ing sys­tem. Should we clas­si­fy this tick­et as a bug or a change? The ques­tion mat­ters for many soft­ware…
  rant 34 communication 27 agile 10
• YAGNI principle in action Dis­cussing YAG­NI with col­leagues, I of­ten find my­self in a sit­u­a­tion where they give me a con­crete ex­am­ple where they were very hap­py to think about a giv­en fea­ture or as­pect be­fore it was re­al­ly need­ed. As those dis­cus­sions al­ways fol­low the same…
  rant 34 productivity 36 quality 36 refactoring 12 agile 10
• Minimum viable product An in­ter­est­ing ques­tion on SE.SE got my at­ten­tion re­cent­ly. The ques­tion is about things that may hap­pen to a pro­ject, in a con­text of a pro­ject which is tar­get­ed to be de­liv­ered eight months af­ter its start. A dis­cus­sion that fol­lowed showed that…
  management 34 agile 10 productivity 36 communication 27