Web Development Business

Refreshing Your Scrum

Keith Shakib Agile, Articles, Consulting, Design, Project Management, Soft Skills 3 Comments

Most of us now have some experience with Agile Scrum practices. Many of us have had years of practice on multiple processes. As a consultant, I have the opportunity to see many differences in how organizations implement and practice the most popular development process methodologies.

While the prescription for good practices is well-documented, many of us have lost our “mojo” at least once and seen many of the benefits of using the process decline.

In this blog, I will indicate some key points required to return to optimal agile performance. I will highlight three common pitfalls, some common causes of those problems, and reminders of how to get back to a high-performance Scrum implementation. Let’s dive in.

Agile Perspective

Tim Broyles Agile, Articles, Project Management 1 Comment

You may think of Agile as just another process. While this is incorrect (as it is a framework created to help developers create processes), there is a fundamental difference between this methodology and most methodologies that have come before.

Agile–done the way it was intended–is revolutionary. Fundamentally, Agile is an advocate of a bottom-up development process. I believe this is why it is often proposed with good intention, however then implemented with a top-down, fixed idea of what the Agile team (and hence the process) will be like.

If you take time to read the Agile Manifesto you will read statements like: ”The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.” Just consider that for a second. The team has the power to keep what works and dispose of what does not.

There are some basic concepts that allow Agile development to be successful. In this post, I highlight the key parts of Agile that appeal to me (as a reluctant process advocate) and have enabled successful Agile development in recent projects…

user story mapping

Every Agile Software Project Needs a User Story Map

Rusty Divine Agile, Articles, Microservices Leave a Comment

In this blog, I share an example of a real-world, agile enterprise modernization project that benefited from a User Story Map.

I’m the team lead for a project to convert a business solution from COBOL to a .NET microservices architecture. Other than some interesting challenges with designing a robust microservices solution, the business logic is very straightforward – input files are processed, databases queried, output files are produced and dropped in a folder, and our goal is to match the output produced by the COBOL solution perfectly.

Yet, we lost our way fairly early on in the project because we had a typical prioritized backlog. Unfortunately, even on a straightforward, well-defined project with an engaged team, we still managed to veer off course.

Our project manager started asking questions about where we were in the project and where we were going. I struggled to answer those questions because I couldn’t make sense of all that was in our backlog. It was around this time that I took a spreadsheet and created our first User Story Map….

Without Automated Testing You Are Building Legacy

Billy Korando Agile, Articles, Effective Automated Testing With Spring Series, Testing 2 Comments

I have worked with several different organizations in my career on initiatives to rewrite legacy applications. A common theme for each project was that the organization struggled to deliver both maintainable and “agile” applications.

As developers, we’re curious by nature. I needed to understand exactly why this happens. In my contemplation of this common challenge, I discovered Automated Testing and became fascinated by it. I have since worked to include it as a central step as I write and maintain applications.

In this article particularly, I lay out how automated testing, or rather the lack there of, lies at the heart of many of the struggles we face as developers…

Event Storming For Rapid Domain Learning

John Hoestje Agile, Articles, Consulting, Project Management 1 Comment

Tl:dr: Use Event Storming to rapidly gain group understanding of complex business domains while having a more enjoyable time.

While I was browsing tech news sites looking for articles, a headline caught my eye talking about domain-driven design (DDD). Its main idea was to implement Event Storming to drive the understanding of the business domain. The more I read about it, the more I saw the value in what Event Storming offered.

On a recent consulting project, we were piloting Agile in a Waterfall environment, so in reality, any requirement gathering process used would have been new. We chose to compare Event Storming to User Story Mapping, allotting just one hour to work with each process. The process that the pilot Agile team favored would then be used going forward.

In this blog, I will share the main takeaways and benefits that became apparent while implementing Event Storming sessions, especially as compared to User Story Mapping. I will first explain the project we worked on and underlying opinions that drove our trial, what key aspects of Event Storming stood out to us, and then tips I picked up along the way for effective Event Storming sessions….