Skiing as an agile vs waterfall metaphor
Posted by Erwin van der Koogh in the wee hours: January 31st, 2010
I was asked by one of my clients to give a short introduction into Agile. As we did not have an appropriate presentation for this kind of audience and knowledge level I decided to create a new presentation. And while I was thinking of a good metaphor to compare traditional waterfall against agile methodologies the pictures of my recent snowboarding trip caught my eye and it hit me; Skiing (or snowboarding) is a very good metaphor to compare both methodologies.
It has the same characteristics as a project in that once you get started it just keeps on going; There are other projects (or skiers) in your way, environments change and conditions might not be what you expected them to be.
Let's see how it works out:
(more...)
Tips for ScrumMasters: How to act on retrospective outcomes
Posted by Marco Mulder in the late evening: November 25th, 2009
In my previous blog, I talked about when to estimate user stories so that a Product Owner can do release planning based on velocity and relative estimates. This time, I will discuss another topic that I see many Scrum teams struggle with: how to implement improvements based on what is discussed in retrospectives.
Many Scrum teams have a hard time to continuously improve themselves. In retrospectives, problems and possible improvements are discussed. Then nothing happens. In later retrospectives, the same problems are discussed without noticeable changes. Retrospectives like this are a waste of time. Even worse, missing out on the opportunity to continuously improve is a big waste in itself. The velocity of such teams and the quality of their deliverables will almost certainly get better if they find ways to act on improvements that are identified in retrospectives.
(more...)
Tips for ScrumMasters: Estimate user stories outside Sprint Planning Meetings
Posted by Marco Mulder mid-afternoon: November 11th, 2009
One of the biggest strengths of Scrum is that it is a framework instead of a detailed methodology such as RUP. In Scrum, concepts are described that make essential aspects of projects fall into place in a very powerful way. One does not need a Process Engineer to tailor Scrum before it can be applied successfully. However, because there are many things that Scrum does not describe in detail, there is plenty of room left to mess things up 
In a series of blogs, I want to share some best practices that I have found useful for ScumMasters. In this first blog, I discuss on how to facilitate the estimation of Product Backlog items so that the Product Owner can do release planning.
(more...)
Visualizing user stories from idea to production
Posted by Marco Mulder mid-afternoon: October 25th, 2009
In many Scrum projects, user stories that are Done at the end of a sprint have not yet been put into production. In other words, production is often not part of the Definition of Done. There can be several reasons for this. Examples are:
- additional acceptance or integration testing is needed that can not (yet) be done within the sprint;
- user stories have dependencies on hardware of software from an external party that is not yet available;
- minimal marketable features are bigger than what can be produced in one sprint.
The READY Kanban: the Product Owners’ Scrum Board
Posted by Serge Beaumont in the wee hours: September 12th, 2009
In my previous posts about the definition of READY and Flow to Ready, Iterate to Done I have tried to shed some light on the Big Black Hole of Scrum: the Product Owner. This is number three in the series.
In my previous blog post I presented the stages that a backlog item flows through before it gets to Ready. But those were the ideas behind it: in this blog post I'll show how I've implemented them in practice. I'll show you two interesting examples.
Fully Distributed Scrum @ Agile2009
Posted by Guido Schoonheim in the wee hours: August 26th, 2009
Agile2009 is the yearly conference of the Agile Alliance. This year we are in the windy city, Chicago. With over 1350 participants, 300 presentations and over 1500 initial submissions, this conference really is the cream of the crop on Agile software development.
This year I had the honor of presenting a case study on Fully Distributed Scrum together with Jeff Sutherland, co-founder of Scrum.
We presented about a Xebia client located in San Francisco working with our office in new Delhi using a single hyperproductive distributed Scrum team! Thats right, hardcore Agile results across all timezones, culture, language etc.
(more...)
What documents to write in an Agile environment
Posted by Eelco Gravendeel at around evening time: August 9th, 2009
Over and over again, the documentation discussion flares up before, during and after projects. What documentation should we make? Why do we need design documents? How can we be sure the correct software is being build if we don't have a complete Functional Design Document. If the Functional design document isn't in line with the actual software being build, how can we check whether we got what we paid for? etc. etc. etc. (more...)
Agile NCR Conference – A Dossier
Posted by Abhishek Agrawal just before lunchtime: August 8th, 2009
Feb 2007 - An endeavor to share our excitement, experience (rather inexperience) and child like curiosity about the new toy - Agile Software Development Methodology (more...)
iCMG Architecture World 2009 Bangalore
Posted by ShriKant Vashishtha in the early morning: July 31st, 2009
Recently I got a chance to attend a 2 days architecture conference in Bangalore organized by iCMG. Some very experienced and renowned figures in software world took sessions on architecture and software development. It sounded like a conference on just software architecture but it catered various other topics which could be grouped under Software development in general. If we leave the question of whether the conference should have focused on architecture only, other topics were also quite good and relevant to software development.
Web performance in seven steps; Step 4: Test continuously
Posted by Jeroen Borgers at around evening time: July 22nd, 2009
Last time I blogged about the importance of representative performance testing. Having production-like properties for hardware, OS, JVM, app server, database, external systems and simulated user load are essential to prevent bad performance surprises when going live. In addition, I described how cloud computing can be utilized to generate high loads on-demand without having to worry about the infrastructure.
Continuous performance testing
With a representative test as one of the last steps before going live we prevent that expensive bad-performance surprises will pop up in production. However, the same surprises will pop-up, only earlier and with less impact. To save costs and prevent large architectural refactoring, it is crucial to test for performance as soon as possible. This is just like any other software defects and Quality Assurance: the later in the development process defects are detected, the more costly these defects are.
At a popular web shop I had the following challenge: (more...)
Archives
Xebia Sites
Categories
- Java (282)
- Agile (109)
- General (50)
- Testing (42)
- Performance (42)
- Hibernate (36)
- Scrum (33)
- Podcast (31)
- Architecture (31)
- Spring (28)
- SOA (24)
- Maven (22)
- Project Management (22)
- Middleware (23)
- Deployment (14)
- Flex (17)
- JPA (17)
- Eclipse (15)
- Xebia Labs (15)
- Quality Assurance (14)