You know by now that Code Inventory is something of an obsession with me. Like it or not, most of us, whether developers or sysadmins, work in a service industry. It's fast and furious, and we don't have time to build features that nobody wants. With sufficient test coverage, there's no code that can't be … Continue reading Code Inventory and Tracking Releases
Tag: Pivotal Tracker
Stealthily Introducing Agile from the Bottom Up
Even today, in the 21st century, it's rare for CEOs to steer their companies into agile waters. Change is hard, scary and leads into the unknown and changing an entire organization compounds all these fears. But, there are subtle, yet significant, ways in which you can organize your own work to be much more agile. … Continue reading Stealthily Introducing Agile from the Bottom Up
PivotalTracker: The Simple Steps To Start a New Project
PivotalTracker is a great tool for organizing your work. No matter whether you work mainly in software development, operations, or in a shared DevOps environment, PivotalTracker keeps you up to the task. Over the last couple of years using it, we've seen some patterns for setting up projects and organizing stories with tags. Start And … Continue reading PivotalTracker: The Simple Steps To Start a New Project
How To Estimate User Stories When Using PivotalTracker
For a team new to agile software development, estimating user stories is not easy. The team is used to estimate tasks in hours and days, and know they're never right anyways. So why bother? In agile, estimating user stories relative to each other using story points can give you a fact based idea about what … Continue reading How To Estimate User Stories When Using PivotalTracker
Too Busy to Blog
I've been busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest the past few weeks. And because of this I haven't been keeping up with my weekly posts. But yesterday, after getting through the guilt trip, I realized that I was missing more than just blogging. I was missing my weekly retrospectives and thereby losing … Continue reading Too Busy to Blog
Visibility Builds Trust
Last week, the CTO of a partner company came over to me and asked: "Hey Matthias, do you have any benchmarks on how many commits your developers do each day? And how many lines of code they produce? I would love to compare the performance of our teams to be able to show my CEO … Continue reading Visibility Builds Trust
Introducing Your Team to Agile Using Pivotal Tracker
Last week I held my first meeting at NetDoktor, introducing the rest of the company to both what I'm doing and how I organize my work. Of course, I'd dropped the 'agile' word around the office from time to time and, suprisingly, most everyone had some idea of what it meant. Sure, it was some … Continue reading Introducing Your Team to Agile Using Pivotal Tracker
Thoughtworks Mingle vs. Pivotal Labs Tracker
As I've shown in my plea to Agile Tool Vendors: Please simplify my life, I currently see only Pivotal Tracker to be a tool which simplifies my life instead of managing complexity. Enterprise Class vs Opinionated Software Maybe the biggest differences between Mingle and Tracker are their core assumptions and target audience. While Mingle is … Continue reading Thoughtworks Mingle vs. Pivotal Labs Tracker
Agile Tool Vendors: Please don’t try to manage complexity – simplify my life!
We've been using Mingle for over one year now and it serves us quite well. During the course of the year, we used it to manage over 2000 stories, issues and chores, and we currently only have around 90 open ones left. The only major shortcoming in my eyes is the lack of a real … Continue reading Agile Tool Vendors: Please don’t try to manage complexity – simplify my life!
Agile Web Operations 