Incorporating UI Design in Scrum Sprints
A question I’ve been getting a lot lately is how to in corporate UI Design in Scrum. Whether UI designers should be part of the Scrum team and whether they should do their work as part of an agile sprint.…
Change Isn’t Free
Agile teams are told to “embrace change,” which is the subtitle to Kent Beck’s wonderful Extreme Programming Explained book. Although an agile team can embrace change, the stakeholders in an organization must understand that change is not always free. Most…
Handling Work Left at the End of a Sprint
It’s quite common for a team to have a bit of unfinished work left at the end of a sprint or iteration. Ideally, a team would finish every item on its sprint backlog every sprint. But, for a variety of…
Shifting from Scarcity to Abundance Thinking
Over the past few months, I've read a few books on marketing. But I've also taken a handful of video training courses on marketing and have been listening to some enjoyable podcasts on the subject. Back when I was in…
Upfront Thinking Is Like Insurance
Insurance is great for all sorts of things. I have health insurance in case I become ill or injured. I have auto insurance that will repair or replace my vehicle if it's damaged. It also protects me in case I…
Budget When You Can’t Estimate
I've written before that we should only estimate if having the estimate will change someone's actions. Normally, this means that the team should estimate work only if having the estimate will either: enable the product owner to better prioritize the…
Quickly Help Users Identify Their Needs
Many projects bog down during requirements gathering. This is dangerous because it wastes valuable time, often setting up a project to be late. To avoid this problem, I like to engage users and stakeholders in very lightweight story-writing workshops. Before…
Are 64% of Features Really Rarely or Never Used?
A very oft-cited metric is that 64 percent of features in products are “rarely or never used.” The source for this claim was Jim Johnson, chairman of the Standish Group, who presented it in a keynote at the XP 2002…
An Iterative Waterfall Isn’t Agile
I’ve noticed something disturbing over the past two years. And it’s occurred uniformly with teams I’ve worked with all across the world. It’s the tendency to create an iterative waterfall process and then to call it agile. An iterative waterfall…
Estimates on Split Stories Do Not Need to Equal the Original
It is good practice to first write large user stories (commonly known as epics) and then to split them into smaller pieces, a process known as product backlog refinement or grooming. When product backlog items are split, they are often…