Thought I’d make mention of the Redmine Backlogs plugin again. It’s been getting some TLC lately. product backlog view, taskboard view, real-time updates, reports, task colors unique to the user’s preference, etc. http://www.redminebacklogs.net
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
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
Unfortunately we don’t have the luxury of having dedicated scrum masters. I am also a team leader and senior developer which more than fills the day.
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
My opinion is that you have an estimation problem. It seems that the time to test each feature is missing, and only the building part is being considered when planning the sprint. I’m not saying it is an easy problem to solve, because it is more common than anything. But things that could help are: … Read more
UPDATE: The burndown excludes the weekends on Visual Studio Online. Later this year, this feature ships with TFS 2013 Update 2 for on-prem customers. See the announcement at http://www.visualstudio.com/news/2014-jan-22-vso. If you want to configure the working days of your team, you can click on the gear button in the top right corner which will open … Read more
Trello.com Trello is free for unlimited users. Period. You almost definitely don’t need “Sub-cards”. Use the checklists instead, or if you REALLY need sub-cards, don’t have a parent sub-card. Just name the tickets something like “Epic – Story A” or “Story – task Z” or whatever. Another idea is to create two boards (did I … Read more
There are several options, and sometimes a combination of these is useful: automated installation disk imaging virtualization source code control Details on the various options: Automated Installation Tools for automating installation and configuration of a workstation’s various services, tools and config files: Puppet has a learning curve but is powerful. You define classes of machines … Read more
Scrum really doesn’t dictate that you have to be working on the one self-contained product. It simply states that there is a bunch of stuff that needs to be done (the product backlog), there is a certain amount of development time available in the next iteration (worked out from the project velocity) and there are … Read more