Agile Chronicles #8: Demo, Burnout, and Feature Juggling

The Agile Chronicles is a set of articles documenting my experiences using an Agile process (Scrum) in software development on my current Flex project.

  1. Part 1 – Stressful
  2. Part 2 – Code Refactoring
  3. Part 3 – Branch Workflow
  4. Part 4 – POC, Strategy, and Design Challenges
  5. Part 5 – Acceptance Criteria & Punting
  6. Part 6 – Tools, Extra Merge Day, and Postponed Transitions
  7. Part 7 – Bugs, Unit Testing, and Throughput
  8. Part 8 – Demo, Burnout, and Feature Juggling
  9. Part 9 – Scope Creep
  10. Part 10 – Conclusions

In this article, I discuss how you fit (or don’t fit) a demo of your software into a Scrum process, the how burnout can skew your burn down, and the variety of ways of features can be cut, re-assigned, or re-designed.

Continue reading “Agile Chronicles #8: Demo, Burnout, and Feature Juggling”

Agile Chronicles #7: Bugs, Unit Testing, and Throughput

The Agile Chronicles is a set of articles documenting my experiences using an Agile process (Scrum) in software development on my current Flex project.

  1. Part 1 – Stressful
  2. Part 2 – Code Refactoring
  3. Part 3 – Branch Workflow
  4. Part 4 – POC, Strategy, and Design Challenges
  5. Part 5 – Acceptance Criteria & Punting
  6. Part 6 – Tools, Extra Merge Day, and Postponed Transitions
  7. Part 7 – Bugs, Unit Testing, and Throughput
  8. Part 8 – Demo, Burnout, and Feature Juggling
  9. Part 9 – Scope Creep
  10. Part 10 – Conclusions

This entry is about the ugly truth of bugs, how you apparently reduce this problem via unit testing, and how we’ve attempted to improve throughput.

Continue reading “Agile Chronicles #7: Bugs, Unit Testing, and Throughput”

Agile Chronicles #6: Tools, Extra Merge Day, and Postponed Transitions

The Agile Chronicles is a set of articles documenting my experiences using an Agile process (Scrum) in software development on my current Flex project.

  1. Part 1 – Stressful
  2. Part 2 – Code Refactoring
  3. Part 3 – Branch Workflow
  4. Part 4 – POC, Strategy, and Design Challenges
  5. Part 5 – Acceptance Criteria & Punting
  6. Part 6 – Tools, Extra Merge Day, and Postponed Transitions
  7. Part 7 – Bugs, Unit Testing, and Throughput
  8. Part 8 – Demo, Burnout, and Feature Juggling
  9. Part 9 – Scope Creep
  10. Part 10 – Conclusions

This entry is about defining what the tools we use for communication in a geographically dispersed team, why we added an extra day for merging code into trunk amongst a branch, and why we’ve postponed the development of transitions.

Continue reading “Agile Chronicles #6: Tools, Extra Merge Day, and Postponed Transitions”

Agile Chronicles #5: Acceptance Criteria & Punting

The Agile Chronicles is a set of articles documenting my experiences using an Agile process (Scrum) in software development on my current Flex project.

  1. Part 1 – Stressful
  2. Part 2 – Code Refactoring
  3. Part 3 – Branch Workflow
  4. Part 4 – POC, Strategy, and Design Challenges
  5. Part 5 – Acceptance Criteria & Punting
  6. Part 6 – Tools, Extra Merge Day, and Postponed Transitions
  7. Part 7 – Bugs, Unit Testing, and Throughput
  8. Part 8 – Demo, Burnout, and Feature Juggling
  9. Part 9 – Scope Creep
  10. Part 10 – Conclusions

This entry is about defining what the acceptance criteria for user stories are so you can confirm you really did complete them during the UAT at the end of the sprint. It’s also about determining when you should abort a task that is taking too much time.

Continue reading “Agile Chronicles #5: Acceptance Criteria & Punting”