Category: Agile
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Thoughts on Estimation
Is estimation a waste of time as a number of posts and discussions would have us believe? Or is estimation a core need because otherwise how can we explore or plan? Is there more to this? Let’s investigate. First a little research into #noestimates yields the following bullet points Looking at an intro, an excellent…
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Risky Business
What could possibly go wrong? You have your visions, plans, roadmaps and a great programme board backed up with lots of exhilarating dialogue. The risks have been ROAMed and everything is under control. In the words of Captain Picard “Make it So”. And so you begin. I go back now to past experiences with risk…
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Agile Values and continuous flow
I was asked recently “How do I summarise the Agile Values as defined in the manifesto?” My feeling about this and why do we have these values is because software is about people, not things. It is about We, not ME. For example We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and…
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Citizenship
I have recently read the book by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde: Large Scale Scrum: More with LeSS The book is an excellent source for ideas and stories, however the idea that teams are empowered to rejected group decisions because a team has full autonomy should be examined. For example if two teams are working…
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Shifting Right
We have all heard about the technique of Shift Left, where test activity is brought to the earlier stages of the life cycle. This is a great way to improve product development as it moves testing activities to the left, which removes ambiguity from the development team. This is enhanced with activities such as TDD,…
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Join The Dots
Joining the dots up is a way to suggest that everything is connected. For example the simplest model we can draw is. But the reality is more like this: Warning, this is a simplified view! The reality is that in both cases the most important measurements are the simple ones that apply to figure 1.…
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Architecture or Design
What is design and what is architecture. There are often discussions about this, so I will put my views out there. Architecture is the technical infrastructure used to deliver value to customers. It is a combination of hardware and software, and to many in the cloud world the hardware is a given. Consider that we…
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Agile and Incremental Design: Part V
How should we document design So how do these conversations get recorded? We need something that is lightweight, easy to use, collaborative and already available. Here we can reach out to the A3 approach used within other lean approaches. One resource for A3 thinking provides a simple description and approach to this technique. But this…
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Agile and Incremental Design: Part III
How did we get here? A little History Architects traditionally worked in a gated environment where they delivered their work through documents that contain the definition of an architecture, or design. These documents are painstakingly reviewed, because errors that slip through this phase are expensive to fix in later phases. Along with useful statements, review…
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Event or Activity
We often work with people who have come from a waterfall or gated environment. They have a built in idea that requirements, design, coding, and testing (etc) are phases. These phases have clear start and end events, in theory. When I discuss these matters with them, i explain that these phases are in fact activities…