agile

agile related posts

Teamwork is lesser work

February 19, 2017, 5 minutes to read

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts—that’s not true. Not universally, at least. Science has known this since the 19th century, that a proper team working together will often deliver less, and of lesser quality, than if the same individuals were working on their own. It’s high time we question the holy grail of “teamwork” to see exactly where it works and where it fails.

Developer turned Product Owner

December 17, 2015, 3 minutes to read

The backlog is a mess. The order is random. There’s no grouping or coherence, let alone a vision of any kind. Stories are unclear, if at all described, and sprint planning takes forever while developers try to figure out what the product owner wants. I heard these complaints over and over again from teams, and then I had a chance to become a product owner myself. Turns out it’s not much different from a developer’s work.

The state of the craft at CraftConf 2015

May 4, 2015, 7 minutes to read

CraftConf in sunny Budapest aims to be the conference in Central Europe where developers share what’s state of the art in building software. Joining the 2015 edition was an easy choice, after the first edition a year earlier received rave reviews from attendees. Three days, 16 talks and a workshop later I emerged with 6,062 words worth of notes, distilled into a few broad trends that seem to represent the edge of the industry right now.

Evolving towards Kanban

August 5, 2012, 3 minutes to read

Kanban is the last stage of software delivery evolution. Right now, at least, as evolution never really stops. The path is usually the same, starting with a disorderly “let’s just code”, moving gradually towards a waterfall system, then painfully stumbling towards a formal Agile framework, say Scrum, and once a Scrum team truly matures, they realize they’re really doing Kanban with a bit of unnecessary paperwork.

Agile is the business approach to software engineering

April 23, 2011, 2 minutes to read

Try, fail, adjust, go back to step one. So it goes on until failure turns into success or you get bored and leave to do other stuff. Such is business. It’s extremely rare that an original idea becomes immediately successful. Most ideas go through an iterative process of trial and error and the end success comes from a sometimes completely different idea than the initial one.

What does it mean to be Agile?

December 3, 2010, 5 minutes to read

Agile? Yeah, we do Kanban. We’ve got our user stories, backlog and deliver iteratively. All good. Except that that’s not what Agile is. Not at all. It’s not the planning poker, story points nor squadrons of Scrum Masters. It’s the spirit.

Agile means transparent

October 25, 2010, 1 minute to read

“It’s so transparent!” is the number one compliment I keep hearing from customers, with whom I’m doing Agile software development for the first time. Because the planning tools are shared and accessible by everyone, it’s visible at a glance where the project is right now: