What do you call a cow with no legs? Ground beef.
Our department took a step back, agility-wise, last month. We have been building a customer portal. While doing so, we’ve also been building out a RESTful business layer to serve our needs. We’ve been building functionality into the business layer as we’ve needed it to provide the functionality we need for the customer portal. A …
I’ve been operating as a Product Owner for the last 4 months. I still have a lot to learn in this role, and this post is meant to share a recent experience to help me collect my thoughts and give readers some insight into my thoughts. My product is a web portal which allows customers …
The Agile Manifesto was created in 2001 as a philosophy for improving the way software is developed. It was created by 17 authors and has become wildly popular in the software development eco-system. If you’ve heard of Scrum or Kanban, those are implementations of Agile. The authors also agreed on 12 principles. This article will …
Around a month ago, I attended a full week of PMP training in my office. It was fantastic. It gave me a whole lot of new tools for my toolbox. It helped me identify a number of holes in my game and gave me some tools to get things back on track. One tool I …
The effectiveness of our retrospective meetings had plateaued for the last couple of sprints, but despite that I couldn’t believe for more than a second that we had nothing else to try in order to grow. We had been running with Agile for the last 9 months, but we weren’t coming up with many ideas to try and …
Recently, with little notice, I had to step back from work for a few days (with a 3 day flu on the tail end of it). This occurred from day 4 through day 8 of a 10 day sprint. The whole time I was gone, I was periodically checking my emails to see if everything was ok. …
I posted one of my articles, Sprint planning meeting introductory script, on reddit to try and stir up some conversations, and the following comment by /u/AgileBandit stuck out to me: 3 hours? Why are your Sprint planning sessions taking so long?! Your team would benefit from more frequent backlog grooming sessions to reduce the need for lengthy …
One of my core beliefs with Agile is that Teams are Greater than Projects. You can get a lot more out of agile by focusing on growing your team by unlocking their full potential. A lot of that is done through removing roadblocks, continuous improvement through retrospectives and fostering chemistry. One way to improve chemistry is …
I’ve become a huge fan of the ‘School of Life’ youtube channel. They make a ton of 5-12 minute videos outlining lessons from philosophers, artists, political scientists, as well as tackling general topics such as ‘The purpose of friendship’ and ‘How to be warm’. They also have a website called the Book of Life. I’m …
My post Sprint Planning Meeting Introductory Script sparked some conversation with an old schoolmate on facebook, Justin Antoszek. He was describing his department. He’s a senior software developer in an R&D department with 3 teams running 3 different projects that have several people involved in multiple teams depending on which project has the highest priority from sprint to …