In traditional Waterfall, requirements were gathered - typically in a MS-Word document - following an esoteric template. In a "strict" waterfall model, this document is frozen after the requirement phase and a Change Control / Change Management process is responsible for introducing controlled changes. (**) [Typically, the document is t...
We user JIRA for bug tracking and release management and we have started using greenhopper for project management inside of JIRA but one thing that it lacks is the idea of user stories versus tasks in those users stories. Does anyone recommend other task board like agile project management tools that fully support users stories and task...
For those of you who have implemented Scrum in your organizations, what were your biggest obstacles and if you did overcome them, how? Thanks in advance, Rob ...
What OSS programmers and projects out ( if programmer then list both ) there actively use Agile methods? if they only use some Agile methods, can you list the methods they are using? I don't mean obscure projects, I mean projects a person is likely to have heard of, eg the Linux Kernel, emacs, gcc,... , ...
** EDIT: Rephrased the question to re-focus ** Our Scrum team meets as seldomly as possible, but we meet with the product owner every chance we get. We track everyone's agreed action points (particularly theirs). We are 100% agile, but our product owner lives in traditional world, we remain off-site. We facilitate him in crossing ove...
Is "Continuous Implementation" the name of a software development methodology? If so, what is it exactly? Do you have experience using it? Note that I know what continuous integration is, but not continuous implementation. Background: today I learned (second hand) of a company that uses "Continuous Implementation" in the context of ...
It seems to me that Agile methodologies encourage us to keep things simple, and lean, and not add complexity and sophistication until its needed. But the pace and volume of technology change encourages the use of increasingly abstract, complex and sophisticated tools and patterns to solve problems that we may not have yet (and may never...
Implementing agile in projects requires the ability to do refactoring. It is not really a must, but code refactoring has proven to be a good engineering practice. In an agile (Scrum) project on the iSeries platform, which requires development (new code and modifications to legacy code) in RPG, RPG LE, is it possible to implement refacto...
I am used to doing development while following agile practices, so short iterations, with very flexible planning, as the design can change based upon comments/suggestions. But, I recently had interviewed for a job where all their development is done in India, and since I have never done anything like that I wasn't offered the job. So, ...
I'm curious as to what other people use for physical Kanban/Scrum boards in their companies. I appreciate that because of sensitive business information you may not be able to provide a photo of the board. I"m looking at to find out what does your board looks like, and how you organize user stories and tasks as they move through a typi...
I am working on a team that is exploring the possibility of adopting agile development practices. One question that we are running up against is deciding when an iteration (sprint) should complete. Let's say we've defined our feature backlog, and produced story-point estimates for them, and we have decided that the first 30-day sprint ...
My team has a goal to minimize the amount of time that our build is broken. We use CruiseControl.NET for continuous integration. What I'd like to find out is how best to approach answering the following question: "In the last {timespan}, how much time has {project-name} spent in a broken status?" For example: "Over the last 1 month, h...
A product is being developed and delivered as features rather than releases, meaning on completion of a feature, it's pushed to staging and then to production. There can be multiple features in development and overlapping the delivery timeline. So, at any point of time the dev database and source control has more than one feature in deve...
We are trying to convert an organization to Agile software development (TDD, Continuous integration, pair programming and code reviews, Scrum, Refactoring). One "selling point" that someone proposed is to advise people from a career point of view that Agile software development, whether today, tomorrow or some point in the future, will...
We have a working team of 3 PHP developers, 1 scripter (Javascript) and 1 architect. None of us have actual experiences with Agile development from any of our previous teams. My question is how to effectively implement Agile development into our team? What should we do first? What are prerequisities? Should we implement all at once or bi...
We have been looking to implement Agile methodology within our geographically distributed development team, so i need suggestions on any free on-line application that you have used and find useful. Right now we are using paper cards and wall to manage this :), but we want to shift to an on-line version preferably free. I have used Targ...
I have been reading about Agile, XP methodologies and TDDs. I have been in projects which states it needs to do TDD, but most of the tests are somehow integration tests or during the course of project TDD is forgotten in effort to finish codes faster. So, as far as my case goes, I have written unit tests, but I find myself going to sta...
I work on a small Agile development team which is part of a large, non-agile thinking corporation. Currently, we practise Scrum and occasionally, we exceed our sprint commitment. My question is, how do you handle burn down charts when you have exceeded your sprint commitment? I can think of two options: Extend the y-axis in the nega...
To me "Agile" methodology is a common-sense oriented approach and one that should likely be adopted for most software projects. I find that while a lot of Middle Tier Developers and Front End developers find it a very sensible project delivery model, plenty of Database developers (and good ones) seem to be totally against it. They are ve...
This thread is a follow up to my previous one. It's in fact 2 questions, so I hope no one minds, as they are dependent on each other. We are starting a new project at work and we consider it as a great opportunity to try Agile techniques in action. We had a brainstorming about ideas we read in several books and articles, and came up wit...