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InfoQ Homepage Prioritization Content on InfoQ

  • Using Machine Learning in Testing and Maintenance

    With machine learning, we can reduce maintenance efforts and improve the quality of products. It can be used in various stages of the software testing life-cycle, including bug management, which is an important part of the chain. We can analyze large amounts of data for classifying, triaging, and prioritizing bugs in a more efficient way by means of machine learning algorithms.

  • How Agile Can Work Together with Deadlines

    Even with a hard deadline, you can still prioritise work in sprints, use daily stand ups to manage blockers, and run retrospectives to improve your ways of working. Stakeholder relationships are key when attempting to negotiate and soften arbitrary deadlines. Start conversations up front to set better expectations and ensure a smoother delivery, particularly when facing uncertainty.

  • Think in Products, Not Projects: Q&A with Ardita Karaj

    Organizations structured around products oversee their work end-to-end. Reversing Conway’s law to establish long-lived teams around the products brings stability and makes it easier to manage and prioritize work. Retrospectives are a powerful tool for product management; they give confidence to continue and help you pivote quickly on what might become high risk or loss for the organization.

  • Delivering Business Value

    Calculating the business value of features is way beyond just a few numbers.

  • Tomas Rybing on Priority Pyramid

    Tomas Rybing, Director, Project Management at Aptilo Networks, proposed a prioritization technique called ‘Priority Pyramid’, in agile environment.

  • Using Cost of Delay to Quantify Value and Urgency

    Joshua Arnold facilitated a workshop about Cost of Delay at the Lean Kanban France 2014 conference. InfoQ did an interview with Arnold in which he talks about the cost of delay: what it is, why it matters, the importance of quantifying it and some tips for getting started.

  • Knowing if You Are Building the Right Product

    Developing and delivering products which customers don’t want and for which there is no market can be costly. Agile can help you to efficiently develop products, but you need to know what to build. How can you find out which products your customers need?

  • Balancing Experiments and Deliveries in Product Development

    Experimentation using for instance lean startup can help you learn about your customers and find out which features and product would be valuable. The value however comes from building products and actually delivering them to customers. You need to find ways to balance between experimentation and delivery.

  • Remove Waste From Your Backlog with the Priority Game

    The priority game is an exercise which Michael Franken did at the GOTO Amsterdam 2013 conference, to make large backlogs manageable. He showed how Scrum can help you to focus and remove waste by not making things that are probably never used by customers.

  • Should You Create User Stories for Technical Debt?

    Agile teams sometimes struggle with the planning of pure technical tasks that have no direct value for the user of a system, but have to be done to deliver working software. Should you create user stories to handle such technical tasks and technical debt, or not?

  • Survey Confirms Biggest Agile Challenges Are Communication and Continuous Improvement

    A new survey, conducted by Serena Software at the recent Agile 2012 conference in Dallas, Texas has confirmed that whilst projects using Agile are working well, they could be much better and some of the biggest challenges include upsteam and downstream communication.

  • How to prioritize tasks based on their value

    Bob Marshall in his new blog post, "The Value", summarises his research on different methods of prioritisation. Together with Grant Rule he developed a new way of understanding team and company goals.

  • Individual Yield

    Tony Wong, a project management blackbelt, enumerates some practical points on individual procutivity. This article wonders how well these apply to software development and contrasts his list with that of other lists.

  • Application Lifecycle Management in Team Foundation Server 11

    Team Foundation Server 11 has added many features in the area of Application Lifecycle Management. Some of the highlights include support for code reviews, iterations/sprints, resource allocation, third part testing frameworks, and a much more capable dependency graph.

  • How to Convince the Product Owner to Prioritize the Backlog?

    Scrum works most effectively with a prioritized product backlog. Prioritizing the backlog is part of the product owner role, but what can you do when your product owner won't prioritize the backlog because he or she doesn't see the value in prioritization?

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