I spoke last time about the organisational challenges of adopting Continuous Delivery. One of the key takeaways was the importance of blurring the boundaries between team ownership in order to facilitate better adoption. This time around I want to zoom in a bit and focus specifically on the challenges faced by specific parts of the pipeline. Depending on how far through adoption you are, you likely no longer have dedicated teams for each of these functions, though the problems outlined here can still exist and derail even the most cross functional of teams.
Planning an Agile backlog
Most Agile methodologies work in small independent units of work, often called User Stories. Coming up with these is its own challenge, and one I plan to tackle in a future post. Today though, I want to discuss how to determine if a User Story is valuable, and from there I’ll outline a method for turning a list of disparate stories into a working backlog for commencing an Agile project.
Picking the right Product Owner
For a lot of our customers working with Made is their first exposure to Agile. As part of any project, we’ll ask them to nominate a Product Owner to work closely with us throughout. Picking the right person for the job can make or break the project – so how do you make sure you choose correctly?
Busting Agile Myths: Story Points and Time
In my last post I mentioned a common controversy linked with story points. Common wisdom asserts that they shouldn’t be used to represent time, but this is on over-simplification which inhibits good estimation.
Continuous Delivery: Organisational Challenges
Adopting continuous delivery for a single team is tough, adopting it across a whole organisation exponentially more so. It’s hard to catalogue all the issues a business may face during a transition, but in this post I’ll discuss the common pitfalls.
Running a Retrospective
A few weeks ago, Fareed wrote about his favourite retrospectives. I wanted to follow up on this and outline what I’d consider essentials for a good retrospective.
Lessons from the Trenches
I’ve worked with organisations at various stages of their Agile transition, during which I’ve seen Agile implemented well, but I’ve also seen it done terribly. In a break from my usual tradition of myth-busting, I wanted to share some hard won lessons from my years as a Scrum Master, and give you some tips to help your Agile transformation succeed where many fail.
Busting Agile Myths: Story Points
Of all the tools in the Agile developer’s toolbox, the most often misunderstood is the Story Point. Some people will tell you a story point is a measure of time, others will emphatically argue that a Story Point measures complexity, difficulty or effort (anything except time!). I’ll tackle that particular can of worms in a future post, first I want to outline what Story Points are, and why they are useful.
