Kategorie: English

  • Personal Taskboard: Evolution to Priorities

    Just a small update on my personal task board: as the open tasks got more and more it was hard to filter and select the next task to pull into WIP (work in progress). Solution: tasks are now sorted by urgency from left to right and by importance from bottom to top. The most upper…

  • Personal Taskboard: Evolution to Kanban

    A few weeks ago I setup a personal taskboard at the wall next to my desk. It had three lanes like a Scrum task board: “open”, “in progress”, and “done”. After one day there were lots of things in progress and two tasks were done already: The major problem was the number of tasks in progress. There…

  • Sprint Meetings in Distributed Scrum

    My current scrum team is distributed in three locations: Location A: developers only Location B: testers and the product owner Location C: testers, developers, and the scrum master In this situation we have to deal with some lack of communication. Location A is in a different time zone, 5 hours away, which makes communication even…

  • Plan-Driven Testing fails with Agile Developers

    There were two situations today in the office that opened my eyes. I finally understand why it is so hard to form a team of plan-driven testers and agile developers.   Our daily scrum meeting went fine today. Our iteration progress is back in parallel with the ideal burndown after a 2 days upward drift.…

  • Transition of the Definition of Done in Regulated Environments

    Projects in regulated environments have to follow strict guidelines and rules. Laws, normative regulations, product risk analysis, and detailled development processes are defined and controlled by Quality Management departments. Besides of that you have to deal with external groups like editorial staff for documentation.   From a User Story’s point of view all of the…

  • Book: Esther Derby, Diana Larsen – Agile Retrospectives

    Everyone working with teams has to read this book!   Authors: Esther Derby, Diana Larsen Title: Agile Retrospectives – Making Good Teams Great http://bit.ly/cvoaH   Rating: highly recommended!   Esther Derby and Diana Larsen describe 38 activities for all stages of a retrospective meeting. These activities provide ways to improve the team work and to…

  • Daily Video Scrum

    Implementing agile methods like Scrum relies on broad communication. With a distributed team there’s a need for much more heavy communication. Unfortunately the distributedness of a team complicates easy communication. In most cases the common ways to send and receive information is one-to-one/many by email: the most anonymous distributed communication from one person to a…

  • Planning Joker für unschätzbare Stories

    Es war einmal ein Team, das sich regelmäßig mit Planning Poker den Story Points ihrer Backlog Items genähert hat. Das Team hatte bereits einige Erfahrung mit dieser Praktik gesammelt. Referenz-Stories waren vorhanden, an denen sich die Teammitglieder für ihre Einschätzung orientieren konnten. Nun gab es in einer Planning Poker Session diese eine Story, für die…