Articles

Retrospectives Engaging Again Make Your Retrospectives Engaging Again

After performing so many meetings at the ends of your sprints, agile retrospectives can become monotonous and boring—and that’s when they become ineffective. This article looks at the reasons this happens and provides some ideas for making those retrospective meetings more lively and effective—and therefore more useful.

Ledalla Madhavi's picture Ledalla Madhavi
No Estimates Hashtag The Case for #NoEstimates

The #NoEstimates movement isn't really about no estimates. It’s about working in a sufficiently agile way that you don’t need estimates. When you break down your work into smaller chunks, you provide more value by delivering working product than you do by estimating. What would it take for you to work that way?

Johanna Rothman's picture Johanna Rothman
Estimates Provide Value How Do Your Estimates Provide Value?

If you are agile, you might spend some time estimating. If you’re using Scrum, you estimate what you can do in an iteration so you can meet your “commitment.” But estimation is a problem for many agile projects. The larger the effort, the more difficult it is to estimate. You can’t depend on ideal days. Do your estimates provide value? To whom?

Johanna Rothman's picture Johanna Rothman
Adopting ALM Will Enhance the Value of Your Test Team

Modern ALM emphasizes total team involvement and a comprehensive set of tools so that the development lifecycle runs smoothly. Joe Farah shows you how test case management is a vital component to a successful ALM strategy.

Joe Farah's picture Joe Farah
Boost Development Lifecycles Using Feedback Loops to Boost Development Lifecycles

Feedback loops serve as opportunities to increase productivity, either in an individual’s performance or in project teamwork or process. Identifying areas for improvement throughout each sprint and turning them into action items can help you track and address the key challenges related to technology or product improvement.

Trinadh Bonam's picture Trinadh Bonam
Drive Product Delivery Taking Vision to Reality: Using Agile to Drive Product Delivery

Product development organizations that skip or rush through critical preplanning activities run the risk of failure. Organizations that use a more agile approach to product development ensure that the teams work on the right things, have the right amount of dialogue with their business partners, and produce the right amount of value to the product.

Jack Walser's picture Jack Walser
Understanding Team Behavior Planning Feature Velocity by Understanding Team Behavior

When planning releases, it’s important to understand where team effort is being spent. By using high and low watermarks, a project manager can determine a suitable approach to take when setting expectations and determining whether it is necessary to alter team behavior to focus more on getting those features into a release.

Dave Browett's picture Dave Browett
No Estimates Making Sense of #NoEstimates

A couple of years ago, the Twitter hashtag #NoEstimates appeared. Its purpose was to start a discussion about alternatives to estimations, but the idea of a project without explicit estimates is odd to most people in software development. However, if you start exploring it, you may find better sources of information to rely on.

Gil Zilberfeld's picture Gil Zilberfeld
Project Management Framework Common Misconceptions about Agile: Agile Is Just a Project Management Framework

When it comes to transitioning to agile, if a team only goes off what it's heard from other teams and doesn't take a class or read any books about the process, misconceptions can abound. And that leads to problems. Read on to have three common agile myths debunked and to learn why agile is a cultural change, not just a project management framework.

Johanna Rothman's picture Johanna Rothman
Common Misconceptions about Agile Common Misconceptions about Agile: There Is Only One Approach

Many teams think they're agile. They might work in iterations and have a ranked backlog, but they don’t see the value they could be seeing. Usually that means they have a number of false impressions about agile. Read on to have three common misconceptions debunked and to learn what you need to do to make your agile transition successful.

Johanna Rothman's picture Johanna Rothman

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