Agile developers know how to estimate story points for customer features. And while transferring this knowledge over to the project team can take a few sprints, it is speedily adopted and velocity becomes a focal point of the sprint planning games. But, if the all the project participants aren't officially on the team, a growing … Continue reading Cross-dysfunctional Teams and the Story Point Fight
Tag: user stories
How to translate “business value” of things that are technically important
Agile teams often struggle with purely technical tasks. They just don't know how to translate technical necessity into business value. This makes it difficult to prioritize technical tasks against User Stories. In this article, I want to show you how to transform the hidden value of technical tasks into visible business value to ease prioritization … Continue reading How to translate “business value” of things that are technically important
How Digital Agile Management Tools Make You Blind (And How A Physical Kanban Board Can Help You See Again)
We've been using PivotalTracker for years to manage our agile software development process. It works like a charm for us. Whenever an idea comes up, we enter it into Tracker as an Epic (no matter how rough and abstract it might be). When the time comes to start implementing it, we usually break it down … Continue reading How Digital Agile Management Tools Make You Blind (And How A Physical Kanban Board Can Help You See Again)
Size Matters – Why You Should Prefer Small User Stories
If you have a lot of big user stories, your velocity will jump up and down wildly. This makes it extremely difficult to tell when a user story will be done. Breaking down your huge user stories into smaller ones will help you smooth the flow and give you a clearer picture. User Stories Start … Continue reading Size Matters – Why You Should Prefer Small User Stories
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
“Done” is the Wrong Measure of Success
It's a very important thing for any agile team to find a definition of Done, which fits the expectations and the environment of the current development. For User Stories, I definitely prefer Done = Released as the most helpful metric. Only if a story is really out there serving users can you truly forget about … Continue reading “Done” is the Wrong Measure of Success
Estimation of User Stories With Story Points as Abstract Size Measure
After discussing which issues we tried to solve by introducing agile practices to manage a remote development team, using User Stories to be able to compare requirements and building a Backlog for ruthless prioritizing I want to share our learnings about agile estimation of User Stories. As you might have experienced, estimating the time required … Continue reading Estimation of User Stories With Story Points as Abstract Size Measure
