Quite often I would complete numerous daily tasks i.e. not working on anything one component in particular. Therefore, I find it quite difficult to remember these individual tasks in our next day stand up meeting. Is it ok to bring a small sticky note with a few reminder points on the previous days tasks? For example, the contents of the...
Are there any web-based usable scrum backlog tools which beat excel? I'm especially interested in a product backlog feature, we can do sprint backlog just fine with post-its. The "killer feature" I'm looking for is that I can assign unique priorities for the backlog items. In Excel or text-file this is a no brainer: the order mandates th...
Anybody tried here using Getting Real(37Signals) approach to develop windows application? (C#/.NET). Or simply put, developing project using agile. We develop windows application which sucks development time. We never get concrete UI definition from Client. We never had any decent design due to this problem or something else. How do yo...
We are looking at starting to do some scrum training and I was wondering if we should look at sending a couple of people to become scrum masters, or bring in a consultant to do scrum training. Also any recommendations for scrum training, either to come in or to go to? ...
Schwaber & Beedle's 'scrum' book (and the other scrum literature I've read) seems to focus on having a releasable product by the end of the sprint. Web development for an established site (at least in our case) consists of developing 'enhancements' (of various sizes) and many small 'fixes'. Deploying (to web) only at the end of the sprin...
I recently joined a new project utilizing Agile methodology. The documentation is scarce to none, except for sticky papers on the whiteboard indicating stories, completed, in-progress, etc. The project is a web app for a workflow that is fairly complicated. Is this common or is it still useful to have functional/tech specs, etc. with ...
My team and I need to work on a project whose bugs are filed in Bugzilla, using Mylyn. Do you know of any tool or plug-in that provides scrum-inspired burndown charts to Bugzilla or Mylyn? Hopefully, this tool would be free for commercial usage, but we're not closed to commercial tools. Update: 4 hours of research allowed me to find v...
Is it possible to use Six Sigma Quality Management with Software Development Processes? What's your experience on that? If you're using an Agile method like Scrum or XP, isn't Six Sigma too bureaucratic? I'm talking about quality management on software development as a whole, since requirements gathering until deployoment and operatio...
In an answer to the question Documents for a project?, Chris Ballance replied that "User Stories" and a "burndown chart" are the two most useful types of project documentation for a developer. My question is, do you know of any good example[s], which I can see (for example on the internet, or in a book), of these kinds of documentation?...
We need to involve our customer development partners in our development process. We're more or less following Agile methodologies. Some customer partners are remote, others closer. We need to minimize travel costs. Our customers are in health care and tend to be busy, expensive, and hard to schedule. What practices and technologies hav...
Picture the scene, a business is thinking about using the Scrum methodology for agile development. They have implemented the Scrum for Team Systems and everyone is very happy with it. However the business wants to capitalise their development cost and have asked for Scrum backlog work item template to be modified to include the time take...
Imagine you work as a contractor in a large project involving multiple systems, and you are creating one of them. The whole project uses a traditional process, but there are smells that tell you that an agile process would be much better. Now the question. Does it make sense to introduce an agile software development process in your own...
At the place I am working we are moving to a more agile approach to project management. For tool support for project management I used MS Project and Target Process in the past. But I think they both have serious weaknesses: MS Project is not very intuitive and therefore hard to use especially for novice users. It doesn't really fit ...
I was reading this blog post: http://www.shakie.co.uk/ramblings/feature-driven-development-riding-the-waves-of-change/ and came across the part about TestDox: Direct quote (hence PHP): Take the following test case as an example class InvoiceTest extends PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase { public function testValueIsInitiallyZero() ...
I have seen a lot of companies buy into the Agile/Scrum process and basically use it for every project, regardless of what it is. When is Scrum not appropriate and can cause more harm than good (generally speaking)? ...
When you are deciding on what methodology or process to use for your project, should you take into account the human factors? If there is any resistance to things, do you go with the flow or force people to change? For example, say you want to push for pair programming but the team members resist to working in that mode (or show dislike...
To those of you who started using scrum in your development teams: Did you maintain the traditional teams or form new ones? At our organization we are split into database, product development and frontend developers (simplified!). I am interested in whether others actually reorganized their whole team structure due to scrum or if you f...
What would you recommend as far as a good color-coding for use on a Storyboard? Is this a good pattern from your experience? http://maxheapsize.com/static/ScrumBoardCheatSheet.pdf What is the most standard color-coding? ...
I read a lot of books about what practices work well or not in software development. And I have NEVER heard about methodoly like ITIL or CMMI in any webcast or book or blogs in the development field. I have heard about these methodologies in my school, and to me it seems to be bureaucratic practices. However every books on development ...
Recently with my coworkers we were discussing how to organize the version control in a Scrum project. More specifically, the criteria for branches creation (per developer, per task, per Story, per Sprint?) and the methods of integration. My opinion was that a useful way to organize it is to create a branch for each User Story, so you c...