If you are releasing a feature across both platforms, you may originally start with that feature described as a single user story but then split the story in two as each team tackles their respective implementations. Read more...
Is your iteration review just a dog-and-pony show for your stakeholders? If so, then you may be missing out on one your most important opportunities to ensure that you’re on track to delivering a great product. Read more...
Many product managers struggle with getting the right level of detail in their backlog. If the backlog is too vaguely defined, then your team picks up stories that aren’t immediately actionable, which can slow them down. On the other hand, if the backlog is too well defined, then it becomes rigid and fails to evolve as your product takes shape. Read more...
Learning to split large user stories into smaller user stories is one of the best things a team can do to improve their workflow. Not only are smaller stories easier to understand—and therefore easier to estimate—but their smaller size makes them inherently less risky for a team to take on. Read more...
The Daily Standup is a core practice of successful teams and one of the first practices that most teams adopt as they seek to improve their collaboration. But despite its prominence, many teams struggle to grasp the point of this event. Read more...
A great iteration planning meeting (IPM) sets the tone for the entire iteration. Your team leaves the session energized, excited, and with a clear picture of how to hit the ground running in the new iteration. But, what if things don’t go as well as you’d hoped? Then your team will leave the session tired and frustrated. They will leave without a clear idea of how to get started on their new set of work. They may even leave without any idea of what their goal for the next iteration even is. Read more...
When you’re bogged down working on your day-to-day chores and features, it can be tough to stay focused on the broader goal of smooth agile development. And while we don’t pretend that we have all the solutions, Tracker is, after all, designed to facilitate precisely that goal. Luckily, the time we’ve spent getting deep down and dirty with Tracker has allowed us to suss out the better agile practices from the. . .less better ones. Read more...
If your team uses Scrum as a development process, the team decides which of the next most important items it can complete by the end of the iteration. However, this “commitment” is often used to hold the team accountable for the amount of work that will be shipped by the end of the sprint. Holding your team accountable for failing to deliver on their engagements is counterproductive and will act as a regime of terror. This is no small issue, and Scrum now suggests using the word forecast instead of commitment. Read more...
To truly understand Tracker you need to appreciate how Labs does what is does. Onsi Fakhouri does a great job explaining just that. Here’s an excerpt from his blog post. Read more...
The Obama 2012 campaign has been hailed as the most tech-savvy and data-driven to date, a sophisticated operation led by CTO Harper Reed. Reed had no problem finding developers eager to join the campaign—the challenge was finding people up for the formidable task before them. A Presidential campaign poses unique challenges: an environment where volatility is the only constant, developers must iterate often, yet there is little margin for error. To meet this challenge, Reed and his team placed an emphasis on people who could resolve problems and learn quickly, rather than focusing on a particular skill set. Read more...
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