Exploring better ways of delivering customer value
The purpose of a reference architecture is to identify the architectural principles that apply when creating a sustainable and scalable solution. As new additions are made to the solution, the reference architecture becomes the yardstick that all solution proposals can be measured against and so enable a fair comparison of ideas. A key test of…
I recently read an article about how to help someone get back to work after a long absence, perhaps due to illness or burnout. There was lots of good advice, such as keeping colleagues informed about adjustments to working hours and limiting responsibilities among others things. But what struck me was how a lot of…
I use the INVEST criteria to help teams define good User Stories. This would normally be sufficient to get any one story into production, but in the case of a new feature (or MVP) this has frustratingly not been enough; the stories just pile up in a feature branch until the team feel there is…
“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.” The Agile Manifesto When I am working with cross-functional development teams, I use the storyboarding technique to help the team break down their work. This usually involves identifying an MVP and creating a prioritised backlog. I also encourage the…
The Kanban board is used to visualise the team’s work. This is usually a mix of Bugs, Tasks and Stories. Good stories should follow the INVEST criteria. If the team are using Jira, then it also allows them to create sub-tasks for Tasks and Stories. Sub-tasks are a useful way for the developers to create…
If you are using releases and Kanban boards in Jira, then you will most likely have a problem with issues not showing on the Kanban board. Specifically, issues are hidden if that have been released but their status is something other than “Done”. This can easily happen as Jira does not check if all issues…
Agile teams often use velocity as a metric to measure the team’s performance. This is a measure of the throughput of the team, how fast they are at delivering stuff. But this metric alone cannot be used to determine if the team are making customers happier or helping the company to make money. To illustrate…
When adopting an Agile development process, the team should start with visualising their work using a Kanban board. At the start, the items on the board will probably cover a whole range of work including hopefully a few User Stories. What can happen then is that if the team uses these items to try to…
Agile software development is about adapting to change, about continuously learning what the customer wants. The team breaks down the solution into small pieces, delivering working software in every iteration that the customer can evaluate and give feedback on. In order to be able to learn faster, the initial releases may sacrifice best practice (in…
In this article I will discuss how to get started with Agile in the most hands-on way possible, with no discussion of frameworks and methodologies. I believe it is important to understand the essence of Agile first, as it is easy to be overwhelmed with all of the techniques and tools that have evolved from…