InfoQ Homepage Agile Techniques Content on InfoQ
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Backlog Grooming: Who, When and How
Backlog grooming as the name suggests is giving regular care and attention to a product backlog so that it does not get ugly and unwieldy like an unattended garden with weeds. Though, it is not a formal process of Scrum, however, Ken Schwaber recommended reserving five percent of every sprint for this activity. A recent discussion on the Scrum Development group discussed and debated the process.
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Soft Skills Are Paramount: A Report From Agile Boston Openspace
Last week the Agile Boston user group held a full day OpenSpace conference. One session was focused on how to affect other groups in an organization that you and/or your team is dependent on. The members of this session shared their different contexts and problems and came up with several strategies in improving their situations, none of which were were Agile practices.
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How to Audit an Agile Team
Stakeholders of an Agile project often seek the help of a seasoned Agile coach to gauge the effectiveness of the Agile process and practices that their team is following. The intention is to plug the holes and make the team more effective. Recently, on the Scrum Development group, Scott Killen started a thread on how to do an audit on an Agile team.
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Toyota Using Waterfall?
Lean software development has been inspired by lean manufacturing and specifically the work that Toyota pioneered in the field. It is then very surprising to find out that the software development arm of Toyota has been working with waterfall and is in it's infancy in lean software development.
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Repetitive Tasks an Agile Smell?
Is slicing stories in horizontal tasks an Agile Smell? Is this common habit used in Scrum/Agile Planning meetings - hurting a team's focus on customer value? What is being suggested instead?
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Monetizing the Technical Debt
Most Agile teams recognize the evils associated with technical debt. Just like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments. These are paid in the form of extra effort required to maintain and enhance the software. Most Agilists recommend repaying the technical debt as early as possible. However, most Agile teams fail to monetize the technical debt.
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Agile Documentation: Is There Clarity?
Agile documentation is not exactly the most clear cut subject in the community? How much documentation should we create? What works? What doesn't? How do we transform from a traditional process to an agile one with regards to documents? This is an area that lacks clarity in the agile community.
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Conflict is Human: Let's Use It Well
Lyssa Adkins, author of Coaching Agile Teams maintains that not only does "resolving" conflict not work - it can even be counter-productive. Can conflict actually catapult teams to higher performance? In her ADP2009 keynote, she presented a model for helping teams learn to de-escalate from destructive into constructive forms of conflict.
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The “Do Not Disturb” Team Member
Many developers like to work in isolation, for some time, if not always. XP recommends a room arrangement called “Caves and Commons”. Commons area is organized to maximise osmotic communication. Caves are meant to facilitate isolation for activities like personal email, phone calls or a quick spike. However, there could be a situations where a team member wants to take this isolation too far.
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What is Story Point? Are they Necessary?
Michael de la Maza asks the question what exactly is a Story Point? He went looking for an answer and found many: “Story points represent nebulous units of time.” or “Story point is a random measure used by Scrum teams. This is used to measure the effort required to implement a story.”
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Uncovering Serious Flaws of Agile and Scrum
Software development is known to be a creative process. The failure of traditional methods, where the dynamic environment of software development was ignored, made Agile methods fairly popular. There has been a growing adoption of Agile methodologies, particularly Scrum. However, is everything all right with Agile? Kai Gilb does not think so. He suggested that there are serious flaws with Agile.
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Rules for Better Retrospectives
James Carr recently published a list of five rules to help improve the effectiveness of retrospectives. The rules are based on his experiences in hundreds of retrospectives, both successful and not.
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Experiment Driven Development - The Post-Agile Way
TDD and BDD are now widely-used software development techniques. However, solely following TDD & BDD may still lead to missed business opportunities, or worse, a negative impact to the business. Two questions which TDD & BDD are unable to answer are: How do you measure the usage of your application? How do you get feedback from your customers? Is Experiment-Driven Development (EDD) the answer?
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A Critique of the Pomodoro Technique
Is the pomodoro technique really all it's cracked up to be? Are we over-analyzing the issue and creating complexity where none is needed? Mario Fusco shared his critique of the pomodoro technique with InfoQ and we are sharing it with our readers along with many others.
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Deciphering Burndown Charts
Burndown charts are considered to be one of the most useful information radiators on an Agile team. It is a graphical representation of amount of work left to do (y-axis) versus time (x-axis). The interesting part is that the analysis of the burndown chart can reveal multiple pointers on how the team is doing and what can they do to improve further.