Check out the video below of David Horowitz presenting on "7 Secrets of Highly Effective Retrospectives" at the Washington DC Scrum User Group (DCSUG). David reveals seven secrets that lead to effective retrospectives including the best way to ensure your retrospectives lead to real change, the "pledge" everyone on your team must take before participating, how…
Here are the top 3 reasons to split a user story: Size – Large user stories need further refinement to break them down into more manageable pieces. Key indicators that a user story is too large are if the estimate is greater than the Sprint duration, or if the estimate is greater than the remaining time…
Check out the video below of Art Moore presenting on "The Agile PMO" at the Washington DC Scrum User Group (DCSUG). Art looks at Program Management Offices (PMOs) in the new (and not so new) Agile world. Art explores if they are needed, what exactly do they do, the fundamental differences with today’s PMOs and how…
Bill Wake came up with the INVEST acronym to help us remember guidelines for writing effective user stories: Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimatable, Small, and Testable. Invest As much as possible, try to make sure that stories are not interdependent as this might lead to prioritization and planning problems. Independent is different from the logical order of…
Before we look at why use user stories, let’s first start by looking at other common requirement gathering techniques. 1st, there is the IEEE 830 with “The system shall… “, The system shall do this…, the system shall do that, and my favorite, the system shall be bug free 😊. We typically start out with an…
A user story is one way of representing requirements in a Product Backlog. Mike Cohn defines a user story as a simple, clear and short description of customer valued functionality. It is composed of 3 parts: a written description used for planning, conversation to flesh out the details, and tests to determine completeness. Similarly, Ron Jefferies…
At AgileDC2015, I presented on Lean Discovery, Agile Delivery and a DevOps mindset. Below is the abstract of the talk, along with links to the Digital Service Delivery blog series and the presentation slides. Abstract: More and more organizations and teams are adopting Agile, however most stay focused on just the development part. They maintain a…
This post summarizes the Digital Service Delivery blog series by focusing on 10 essentials for successfully using Lean Discovery practices, Agile Delivery techniques and a DevOps mindset to build solutions our customers love. Lean Discovery practices help us ensure that the solutions we are building are not only viable from a business perspective and feasible from…
To truly succeed in Lean Discovery and Agile Delivery practices and techniques, an organization must adopt an Agile and DevOps mindset. This is more than technical practices to automate our deployments. This requires a culture change aligned with Agile values and principles. This culture change is about focusing on continuously delivering high value working features on a…
In the Lean Discovery blog we saw how these practices help us narrow our focus on an MVP and ensure we are building the right thing. Agile Delivery practices help us build the thing right. Moreover, nothing beats true validated learning than having a feature released to a subset of our user base and measuring specific…
Lean Discovery Practices help us validate our MVP to ensure we are building the right thing. Eric Ries, author of Lean Startup, reminds us that “The big question of our time is not can it be built, but should it be built?”Eric Ries To know that, we have to go through quick build, measure, and learn…
The Agile value proposition is about early delivery of business value, reduced risk, increased visibility, and increased adaptability. These are achieved by continuously delivering customer-valued functionality by building minimal viable products (MVP) and minimal marketable features (MMF). Minimum Viable Product vs. Minimum Marketable Feature The terms MVP or MMF are often used interchangeably, but are they…
Initial Understanding of Agile There are many problems organizations face in delivering digital solutions and products. These problems might be due to the long concept to deployment cycles and the lack of feedback loops in our traditional waterfall software development approach. To solve these problems, organizations decide to go Agile and take and iterative and incremental…
Delivering Digital Services to our stakeholders and customers is hard and the overall industry success rates are dismal. The reasons are many, but some of the most common problems are below. Do any of these sound familiar? Long and painful testing cycles: After months and months of coding an application, the team declares it done (but…
The term Digital Services refers to the electronic delivery of information including data and content across multiple platforms and devices like web or mobile. Information is presented in a way that is easy to use and understand and typically involves transactional services such as submitting forms for processing and receiving benefits. Think of applying for a…