I was messing around with some Ruby stuff tonight and was reading up on the Cucumber project. Cucumber is a behavior driven development (BDD) testing tool. Anyone who talks to me about user stories knows I’m kind of a stickler on the value statement. I think I’ve found a kindred soul in Aslak Hellesoy, the …
Category Archives: Agile
10 Questions to Think About Before Adopting Agile
Agile. Everyone is doing it, so should you, right? Not so fast. Even though it’s being sold as a silver bullet by various vendors and consultants, agile is far from easy. In fact, I’d argue that adopting agile is harder than moving to a process heavy software development methodology. At least with the process heavy …
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Project Vision – Don’t Even Start Without One
It’s amazing to me how many projects start up without a clear vision. I’m not talking about an idea. I’m talking about a no kidding vision. And, no, I’m not picking on those who start projects on the side or just for fun. I’m picking on the those of us who are involved with projects …
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Agile and Estimates and Contracts! Oh My!
Over the last six months, I’ve been mulling over one of those subjects that has often been a stumbling block for IT providers considering adoption of agile for their customers’ software development projects. The dilemma revolves around contracts and estimating projects. The two tend to go together. Once you have one figured out it seems …
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Oxymoron: Enterprise Agile Project Management Software
My favorite agile software development topic of them all — tools. More specifically, agile project management tools. If you’re old school, you bust out some index cards, some butcher paper, some writing utensils, and you get to work. If you’re trying to use one of the simplest of agile project management software tools (that most …
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Death of a User Story
In my last post I wrote about user stories and how it’s easy to write a user story and forget to include the value statement. Now that we’re all writing user stories with value statements, I thought it would be interesting to look at another phenomenon I’ve seen far too often when it comes to …
So That…
One of the most overlooked parts of user stories is the content that follows those two little words, “so that.” I’ve found that we (those of us working on agile projects) tend to do a good job of writing user stories until it gets to those two little words. For example, let’s say the iPhone …
Your Search is Over: The Definition of Done in 3 Easy Steps
Has your team struggled to define “done” for user stories? You are alone. Everyone has this one figured out. You must be new to this thing called agile software development. What’s that? You’ve been doing this agile thing for some time now? Wow, that has got to be depressing. I’m sorry to hear that you’re …
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Distributed Agile Teams Don’t Work
The title of this post is misleading. I think distributed agile teams do work, but only if everyone is remote. I’ve come to the conclusion that what doesn’t work are what I call “semi-distributed” teams. Semi-distributed teams are those where some people are co-located and others are not. I’ve seen all sorts of arrangements over …
I Think I’m Going To Write a Book
Today was a real break through. I was talking to two senior developers here at Gestalt this morning about how to test some code one of the teams in the Joplin, MO office is working on. I came up with this awesome idea that I threw out there to these two devs. I said, “We …