Developer: “I’m taking a bio break. I’ll mark that down as 1 point!” This of course is an exaggeration and I truly hope no team is doing this. However, team members are doing similar things when it comes to estimating using story points, especially when velocity is being tracked by upper management. When this happens, there…
Many teams struggle to deliver a Product Increment at the end of every Sprint. Here are the top 5 reasons why teams can't do that consistently: Lack of understanding of what a Product Increment is There is a general lack of understanding as to what a Product Increment is and how we build things iteratively and…
Development Manager: “Yes we are a self-organizing team. I task out all the activities and let the team decide which tasks they want to work on. I don’t assign any of the tasks myself.” Not assigning tasks is a good first step, however, it falls short of what is means to be a self-organizing Scrum team.…
I typically see teams in one of 4 stages when adopting Agile practices. The Multi-Sprint Hand-Off Teams here are working in Sprints. 2 week Sprints. They have a requirements Sprint, a Design Sprint, a Coding Sprint and a Testing Sprint. This might be better than what they were doing before but it is still taking 8…
Developer: “I don’t have much to do. I’m still waiting on the BAs to finish writing the user stories. They always hold us back!” A comment like this highlights siloed thinking among team members. There are only 3 accountabilities in Scrum. A Product Owner, a ScrumMaster, and Developers. Note that Scrum does not mention business analysts,…
Customer interviews are key to understanding our users and validating product ideas early. Here are 5 customer interview rules to follow when conducting problem interviews with customers in order to validate a particular hypothesis. 1. Do the interviews in person, 1 person at a time Interviewing in person and focusing on an individual helps establish a…
Scrum Master: “Are you sure it’s going to take this long? The product owner wants it done in the next Sprint and I already told her it won’t be a problem.” I have 3 issues with this kind of statement. First, it seems that the Scrum Master is acting as the intermediary between the Product Owner…
Developer: “Last Sprint I delivered 18 story points all on my own!” This post will not be about story points. I will leave the story points are evil discussion for another time. Instead, I want to focus on the intent behind such a statement. And by intent, I am referring to the proud declaration and feeling…
Bizarro Scrum is like Bizarro world where everything appears to be the opposite of what it should be. It is about common day to day situations that a lot of Scrum teams experience when they transition to Scrum. In this Tales of the Bizarro Scrum blog series, I’ll highlight statements that team members make that on…
At the 2019 Global Scrum Gathering in Vienna and at AgileDC 2019 in Washington, DC, I presented on Test Driven Development. Below is the abstract of the talk, along with the presentation slides. AgileDC 2019 Abstract: Have you tried TDD? Do you hate it? Do you have a hard time applying it in practice? Do you…
At the 2019 Global Scrum Gathering in Austin, TX, I presented on Agile Testing. Below is the abstract of the talk, along with links to the Agile Testing blog series and the presentation slides. 2019 Austin Global Scrum Gathering Abstract: Many teams struggle with fitting in testing activities inside of a Sprint. They end up doing…
Here are the top 8 things to consider when developing your Agile testing strategy to enable you to continuously deliver a quality working Product Increment at the end of every Sprint 1. Testing in not a phase Testing is not a phase that happens at the end of a project and it’s not a phase that…
Ensure that Exploratory testing is part of your testing suite. Most manual testing should be spent on Usability and Exploratory Testing. These types of tests are non-scripted and thus cannot be automated. These tests need human interaction, observation, analysis, and intuition. With usability testing, a human needs to verify that the design, layout, and user interface…
When you are coming up with a testing strategy for green field applications, you should follow the testing triangle or pyramid. For legacy application, a different strategy is needed. Writing tons and tons of unit tests when working with a very large application with zero tests is very costly and results in very little benefits. A…
Acceptance test driven development takes the TDD practice and applies it to acceptance tests. On day 1 of the Sprint, before we begin coding a particular user story, we start by reviewing the acceptance criteria and thinking about how we will verify via tests that this story is complete. Typically, a single acceptance criteria might map…