The ideal agile team is made up of specializing generalists – but what does that really mean? The goal isn’t to prevent functional silos of expertise, it is to allow people to cover for each other.
Category Archives: Software development
Agile Estimation, Prediction, and Commitment
Your boss wants a commitment. You want to offer a prediction. Agile, you say, only allows you to estimate and predict – not to commit. ”Horse-hockey!” your boss exclaims, “I want one throat to choke, and it will be yours if you don’t make a commitment and meet it.” There’s a way to keep yourself off the corporate gallows – estimate, predict, and commit – using agile principles.
This is an article about agile product management and release planning.
Posted in Agile, Business Analysis, Prioritization, Process Improvement, Product Management, Project Management, ROI, Requirements, Software development, User Stories
Tagged agile estimation, agile prediction, agile release planning, cone of uncertainty, project planning, release planning
101 Comments
Agile Documentation
Agile values working software over comprehensive documentation – it is 1/4th of the original manifesto. That doesn’t mean don’t document! It means don’t document more than you need to document. Documentation does have value, but the practice of documenting got excessive – that’s why a reaction to the bad stuff earned a spot as one of the pillars of agile. How do you avoid over-reacting when changing a culture of over-documentation?
Good Stuff on Agile and UXD
Best practices for user experience design and agile. I don’t have the brainpower at the moment, or the experience and eloquence in general, to say it better than these guys. So this week, I’m phoning it in, and deferring to these folks to say it far better than I can.
Read the rest of the article …
A Prototype is Worth a Thousand Lines of Code
A picture is worth a thousand words. A prototype is worth a thousand lines of code. Two key elements of product management – and of agile development are elicitation and feedback. Low fidelity artifacts can significantly improve both. Polished, codified prototypes can create problems that prevent you from getting the benefits of communication.
Posted in Agile, Business Analysis, Business Rules, Interaction design, Interface Design, Product Management, Requirements, Requirements gathering, Software development, UX, Uncategorized
Tagged agile interaction, Communication, process prototyping, prototypes, prototyping, uml as prototype
28 Comments
Cadence Versus Risk
I’ve been thinking about the software development process. Big, upfront, design and requirements. User research and analysis. Market insights, gained on exploration or over time. Release cadence – how quickly you get, and incorporate, feedback from your customers about your product. How quickly you react to your competitors’ reactions to your actions.
Read the rest of the article …
Use Cases for Iterative Development
Almost everything I’ve read about use cases focuses on describing what needs to be added to your product. Agile development says “get it working first, make it better second.” That means changing the way the software enables a user to do something they can already do. How do you manage requirements for incremental improvement?
Read the rest of the article …
Posted in Agile, Business Analysis, Interaction design, Prioritization, Product Management, ROI, Requirements, Requirements Models, Software development, UX, Usability, Use Cases
Tagged agile development, agile use cases, incremental development, iterative development, satisficing, use cases
17 Comments
Atomic Requirements
Each requirement you write represents a single market need, that you either satisfy or fail to satisfy. A well written requirement is independently deliverable and represents an incremental increase in the value of your software. That is the definition of an atomic requirement. Read on to see why atomic requirements are important.
Sprint Backlog – Don’t Solve Half of the Problem
Every team that transitions to agile faces this problem – some stories are too big to fit in a single sprint. Most of the teams that I have worked with have the wrong instinct – to solve half of the problem for all users.
The right approach is to first solve all of the problem for a subset of the users.
Foundation Series: Inside A Scrum Sprint
People who already use Scrum will only find one new thing in this article – a way to communicate what happens inside a sprint that has proven effective for me. People who are new to Scrum who wonder “how do things work inside a sprint?” will see how things work in a way that avoids hyperbole and is easy to map to what they already understand from traditional software development processes.
Latest Articles
Comments on all Articles
