Iterative – you don’t finish a feature in one go. You are in a code >> get feedback >> code >> … cycle. You keep iterating till done. Incremental – you build as much as you need right now. You don’t over-engineer or add flexibility unless the need is proven. When the need arises, you … Read more
How do you know your unpaired programmers are any more efficient ? I sometimes think the single/pair is comparable to the old fairytale of the rabbit and the tortoise. Pairing doesn’t drift off into days of counter-productive work. I have no idea of how often I’ve seen developers spending weeks working on stuff that later … Read more
You might want to think of your story as a vertical slice of the system. A story may (and often will) touch components in all of the architectural layers of the system. You might therefore want to think of your tasks as the work needed to be done on each of the components that your … Read more
A whiteboard and Post-it notes! alt text http://blogs.imeta.co.uk/images/blogs_imeta_co_uk/tquinn/WindowsLiveWriter/KanbanBoard_E65B/KanbanBoard_2.jpg
First off – ask yourself are you really doing Agile? If you are then you should have already delivered a large portion of usable functionality to the client which satisfied their requirements in the earlier sprints. In theory, the “damage” should be limited to the final sprint where you discovered you needed large design changes. … Read more
Here’s the fundamental question. When will the client think they’re done? If they think they’ll be done by June, then you put an Agile team in place. That’s 4-6 people for 6 months. That’s the budget. Essentially, you do the multiplication for them. team * rate * 6 months. If they think they’ll be mostly … Read more
The general consensus is that: Product backlog Item is something that can be delivered in a single sprint. Feature is something that can’t be delivered in a single sprint, but that can be delivered in a single release. Epic is something that transcends releases. Theme is a cross cutting concern. Theme is generally implemented as … Read more
Taiga is 100% free and has all the features that comes with something like JIRA. http://taiga.io/ It even has a burn-down chart! So that’s a win! Here’s a site with a nice overview of what Taiga integrates with and real developer opinions on the tool. http://stackshare.io/taiga
Yes, something like a subset. This article is a good read: Features vs Stories Excerpt: I realized today that I hadn’t made explicit the difference in my mind between features and stories and it’s an important difference. Essentially, a feature is a group of stories that are related and deliver a package of functionality that … Read more
All sprints are iterations but not all iterations are sprints. Iteration is a common term in iterative and incremental development (IID). Scrum is one specialized flavor of IID so it makes sense to specialize the terminology as well. It also helps brand the methodology different from other IID methodologies 🙂 As to the sprint length: … Read more