Make it work, Make it good, Make it easy! While I have had this framework in my head for a long time, I recently shared it with my product team so that they also could have it and use it to make decisions about priorities. Make it work! Make it good! Make it easy! The…
Software Team
User Stories: Are Acceptance Criteria Factorable?
Tighter acceptance criteria == lower cost, faster delivery, and higher quality. Do you agree? Here is one way to think about this as a practice.
Theory of Constraints applied to Agile Delivery
We have all heard of how agile is supposed to help us improve software delivery, making it faster, cheaper, better, blah blah blah. But does it always? What do we need to know to actually get the benefits we seek?
The Beast
You adopt practice to “make the team go”. However, every practice you adopt has a cost. The time you spend “making the practice go” is somewhat then a cost of making the team go. I like to talk about the cost of your practices as “Feed the Beast!” But what you really want to make…
Being Agile (is not the goal)
Just reacting to a thought that floated around me in a meeting today. Someone complained that a certain way of doing something “wasn’t very agile”. That’s not very agile. I recognize that I have said it myself. That’s not very agile. As if… Agile is the goal.
The Other Side of Product Investment
If you are a project manager that does software projects, you deal with the “top side” of product investment all the time. Whether your teams are running agile like scrum or kanban, or whether they are running a phase-gated cycle (waterfall), you are focused on the decisions about organizing the investment into packages for release…
The Perfect Product Road Map
At the core of every software product road map are two concepts. These are essential to all software product development. We may think of different things, and we may use different terms or even look at them from different angles but at the end, I am convinced that it boils down to only two things:…
Smaller Bets (Story Elaboration Pushback)
It is always better to spend the least amount of (time, effort, money) to get what you want, right? If I can get a tasty meal for $10 why would I pay $30 or $200 – for the experience of eating – that isn’t about taste. That is a different thing, isn’t it. We have…
Team Behaviors
In my recent post on Optimum Iteration Length, I finished by saying that iteration size is not the cure for bad team behaviors, but shorter iteration size makes those behaviors more apparent. This post is about how to counteract ineffective team behaviors, from my own experience: There are three general diseases that have lots of…
Optimum Iteration Length
In recent months, I have had quite a few conversations with Agile teams, and one topic that comes up is how to decide on or why to adjust iteration length. When a team is adopting agile practices, they often ask “What is the best iteration length?” Like everything else in software development, my answer is…