Experienced agile practitioners take for granted that detailed requirements are captured as user test cases. For organizations transitioning to agile, this is one of the more challenging practices for them to adopt. Some product owners or business analysts still view the traditional “requirements document” as the way to capture detailed requirements. Because of their attachment to … Continue reading Who Should Write UATCs?
Normalizing Story Points Across Teams
On a large-scale agile project/program with multiple Scrum teams working toward the same overall goal, having user stories sized in a way that makes it easier to re-assign them from one Scrum team to another provides provides a planning and execution advantage when balancing work across teams to optimize delivery dates. Before adopting a common story points scale, there are a couple … Continue reading Normalizing Story Points Across Teams
Database Refactorings on Large-Scale Projects
It was six weeks before the big deployment, and tensions were running high across the five feature teams on the project. Just as a team thought they were approaching the finish line, a slew of big and small database refactorings stalled progress. Tables were re-structured. Columns were added or renamed. One team’s tech lead sent … Continue reading Database Refactorings on Large-Scale Projects
Essential Agile Skills
As organizations adopt agile practices, there are several key skills that differentiate high-performing teams from mediocre teams: 1) Working in short timeboxes For a team that is accustomed to delivering working code every six or eight months, two or four week long iterations can be unfathomable. But doing this is essential to the success of … Continue reading Essential Agile Skills
Agile Reflections 