Agile Chronicles #12: Technical Debt

I know it may sound like I’m painting a rosy, infallible picture of Scrum.  It’s the truth, though, and I feel like it solved most of my project problems.  There is, however, one main problem I saw that made Scrum, and Iterative Development in general, fall flat on its face.  It’s called Technical Debt, and it’s a problem with programming in general, not Scrum/Agile.  When it rears its head in Scrum, the effects are devastating, and I believe one of the main reasons Scrum fails for a lot of people.

This article will discuss what Technical Debt is from a Flash/Flex developer perspective, how it negatively affects my Scrum projects, and what are some of the prescribed ways to prevent it.  Nothing ground breaking here folks, just corroboration that TD IS a major problem, and not even Scrum is immune.

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Agile Chronicles #11: The Backlog and Product Development Challenges

I wanted to talk about the Backlog again with regards to Scrum, an iterative Agile Software Development process. I’m working on 2 products simultaneously in my spare time, and have noticed a few patterns the Product Backlog has helped me with, as well as pointing out priority problems. I thought it important to bring this up again on what a Backlog is, how it solves the scope creep problem, and how you can use it incorrectly.

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Agile Chronicles #10: Conclusions

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 reflect on how my first time in Agile worked on my current project.

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Agile Chronicles #9: Scope Creep

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 Scrum for the most part brings Scope Creep under control, the areas where it doesn’t, and what you can do about it.

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