The team continues to complain about working with that legacy codebase because it has so much debt. That software debt slows them down in feature delivery and they are wondering if we can push for priority to be put into paying it back some?” asked the ScrumMaster. The IT Development Manager looked distraught about the [...]
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Guest post: Managing Software Debt
Managing Software Debt Continued Delivery of High Values as Systems Age Many software developers have to deal with legacy code at some point during their careers. Seemingly simple changes are turned into frustrating endeavors. Code that is hard to read and unnecessarily complex. Test scripts and requirements are lacking, and at the same time are [...]
Guest post: Artful Agile
When the global Agile Tour made it’s 2011 stop in Sydney, little did we know that a new Agile game was about to be born. The Sydney leg of the tour was a fantastic couple of days full of wholehearted interaction and efficient, self-organizing groups. The opportunity to create a new Agile game was presented to [...]
Building a car with principles for Scrum, Agile and Lean
Joe Justice presented the opening keynote at the Scrum Global Gathering in London. The topic was how Agile, Lean, and Scrum can fit manufacturing. More specifically he talked about the development of the SGT01 – a 100 mpg, four-seat commuter car with a mid-engine and rear-wheel drive. This is an interesting keynote in large part [...]
Charlie Sheen, for the win!
I saw this at a client site, and had to laugh. Charlie Sheen, for the win!
Zombie User Stories … User Stories that return from the dead!
Some User Stories that never seem to die. No matter how hard you work on them they get carried over to the next Sprint … Sprint after Sprint after Sprint. Welcome to the nightmare of Zombie User Stories(*)! Zombie (User) Stories are a bad thing for a number of reasons; first, they sap the teams [...]
Splitting up test suites at Etsy
Following last weeks post on how Esty manages development and operations they have posted another good blog post. This particular posts talks about how they have divided up their test suit to enable very short deployment times. Here’s the introduction: Lately we’ve been deploying code 25 times a day or more, and running automated tests [...]
How does Etsy manage development and operations
I was browsing Quora [1] over the weekend and came across this post (below). Although it’s not directly related to Agile or Scrum, it’s a fascinating glimpse into how Etsy [2] manage their development and operations: http://www.quora.com/How-does-Etsy-manage-development-and-operations [1] Quora.com is a social question and answer website. It’s similar to other existing Q&A websites like StackExchange. [...]
Does collocation impact collaboration?
The Scrum community has long recognized that collocation is important to collaboration. Until recently there has been little in the way of formal studies that support this point of view, although there has been a lot of anecdotal evidence. It appears that the tide is turning. Within the last six months I’ve seen two really [...]
How does radical collocation help a team succeed?
Over the last few days there has been a discussion on the Scrum Alliance news group about team rooms. EricG started the discussion by asking, “I’m looking for data to guide green field creation of work spaces for Scrum teams. Any pointers?” There were a number of very interested replies, and I would urge you [...]
