Category: Agility

With this post I want to shed some light on my experiences with Sprint Burndown charts. Especially the question of who owns the Sprint Burndown chart and is responsible for drawing it. In case it is not presented on a flip chart, the matter will be about who maintains the status in the used tools. Should it be done by the team that implements the software or should it be done by the person responsible for planning the scope, the product owner. In Scrum, a method of agile software development, should it be possible that the scrum master or agile coach draws the Sprint Burndown chart? Before we narrow down the topic, let’s look at what a Sprint Burndown chart is good for. A Sprint Burndown chart is a chart …

Should You Draw The Sprint Burnbown Chart? Read more »

Are your estimates for the duration of tasks not accurate enough? Do you spend more or even less time than you thought you would? This is particularly unpleasant when time is limited. Accurate estimates of task needs practice. The bigger the task the less accurate your estimate usually is. Inaccurate estimates sum up and make it difficult to plan. Completion of larger work items is more difficult to predict due to a sum of inaccurate task estimates. The estimate is therefore not useful for planning. Having experienced this in several teams, I thought of a way to test estimates and improve them. This simple exercise helped to do just this. It can be applied to any task that you are facing. Before starting the task, write down an estimation of how long you think you …

Improve Yourself – Accurately Estimate Tasks Read more »

„Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much“ Helen Keller Collaboration is the subject of this post. You will learn about â€žcustomer collaboration over contract negotiation“ with considerations for daily use in software development. Collaboration is the keyword. It is hard to imagine software development undertakings that go without contracts. With “customer collaboration over contract negotiation”, all negotiations should happen collaboratively. This means that negotiations are transparent with no hidden agendas. Pricing should be fair for all parties. If a software development undertaking starts with hidden intentions, it will become difficult to work together in a truly agile manner. One of the values of agile software development, trust, is missing from start in this case. This doesn’t mean …

Unfold The Agile Manifesto – Part 1 Read more »

User Stories and their Acceptance Criteria as the base of implementation work is shown by the example of drawing a house in this post.

User Stories are commonly used in context of Agile software development but that’s not a limitation. Acceptance Criteria will allow you to determine whether or not you have completed the implementation of a User Story.

Read more ›

Understanding Agile Story Points or Scrum Story Points seem quiet challenging if you are only experienced with time based estimations. This post hopefully eases the situation and makes Story Points clearer.

Story Points are commonly used in Agile software development. When talking about Agile software development we are talking about Scrum in most cases, but there are other methods as well.

Historically Story Points arise from a military context, when during the Cold War the Delphi Method was developed to forecast the impact of technology on warfare. The goal was to get a forecast or estimation of probability and expected development time of a certain technology in a single indicator.

Read more ›