The waterfall approach to handling tasks is antiquated. Embrace rapid application development using iterative task management and Scrum.
Thirty years ago our managers enabled uninterrupted work. Today they throw as many interruptions at us as they can manage. Independent work is derided.
The agile movement is now dead with the final blow dealt by McKinsey recently promoting an “agile transformation office”.
Agile is Awesome! But where did I go wrong?
Today’s enterprises are under increasing pressure to deliver software faster than their competitors, differentiated solely by the quality of their applications and the developers who build them.
Today I am going to talk about one misconception made by developers: Continuous Integration is about running automated integration pipelines…
"In the middle of 2018, in the midst of the Blockchain and crypto-mania research and roadshows, I was consulting with dozens of startups on China strategies, dealing with endless emails, taking calls during the night due to different time zones, and constantly answering pop-up messages on Whatsapp, WeChat, Telegram, and Facebook. Ultimately, it was negatively affecting my mental health. My head felt like hundreds of tabs in a single browser trying to load multiple types of information..."
Countless hours have been spent by teams all over the world debating over this. But really, should you?
If you’ve ever been involved in sprint planning and argued to carve out time to pay back some technical debt (i.e. define a tech debt budget), this is how to go about it.
Return to what works and jettison the fads
Engineers need feedback so they can improve skills and deepen knowledge. According to the editor of the Inc. Magazine, Jeff Hayden, traditional metrics can be misleading, as they do not always offer a clear result. Evaluating the work of staff used to be difficult, before Git Analytics tools, such as Waydev came up with a data-driven approach to engineering leadership to help you bring out the best in your engineers.
This is the first in a series of posts about my experiences developing software in healthcare with my team over the last few years. For most of that time we’ve worked in eye care, with doctors and patients in major centres in Europe, North America and Australia, as well as with global life science companies, on projects aimed at improving care delivery and patient outcomes.
This is Part 2 of a 4 part series. Part 1: Why Software Requirements In The Real World Are Hard discusses the challenges of developing requirements and what good ones might look like. This post looks at the requirements development process and its outputs on a real-world project.
Everyone wants to go Agile today. Teams want to put the user in the center of their product development process while building products. After all, you are building the product for your users, right?
In a recent encounter with agile community, I was asked ‘what agile means to me’. Simple question but difficult to answer provided the nature of question being open ended. This certainly got me thinking. I started skimming through multiple ways I can answer this question. I had to revisit my past and reflect on different phases of my agile journey.
During my years as a coder, business analyst and technology consultant, I have heard many a manager or business owner complain about their on-staff developer. I have even sometimes heard them referred to as a “single point of failure.” At that moment, I know that I am entering a political minefield. My years of experience alert me to the fact that if someone in power thinks their developer is a single point of failure, then most likely the developer is not being properly managed.
Everyone wants to go Agile today. Teams want to put the user in the centre of their product development process while building products. After all, you are building the product for your users, right?
If-else keyword built into nearly every programming language and simple conditional logic are easy for anyone to understand. If you are a programmer, you know else keyword. But if you are a good programmer, don’t use this keyword. One of the biggest mistakes I fell into when starting was overusing the else keyword when writing conditionals. I stopped using this keyword in my programs since 5 years ago. Let me explain!
As a Project Manager, one of the most important things that I’ve learned over the years is that Daily Stand-Ups are an effective tool that can solve a particular problem.
Up until pretty recently my company’s tech team managed its projects through a Kanban-board. In practice this entailed that we’d come up with a product roadmap for the 12 months ahead and would start working on this from top to bottom, moving tickets through the usual swimming lanes as we went.
You know that the digital project management field is growing, so companies require a fantastic project manager (PM). In case you are a programmer, then you know about the working of digital tools, tight-knit teams, competing deadlines and outside clients. Therefore you can become a proper PM and fulfill the requirements of the company. In the modern era, the majority of the people are looking for programming as their careers, so you must have to find a path to stand out. It is possible that you get tired of optimizing user experience (UX) by debugging codes, and now you want a different type of challenge.
If teams are not disciplined about the process, or not technically mature enough to actually deliver the work committed to a sprint, scrum processes are bound to fail.
AI has immense potential in improving and speeding up the accuracy of the software application development process. It has made a significant important contribution in software application development, mainly AI focus on increasing the efficiency of the project. Concerning these benefits, the companies are interested in investing in AI to enhance its profitability.
I remember learning about lean manufacturing at Toyota in an early middle school business class, and was endlessly fascinated by the idea of minimizing waste and maximizing productivity through intentional design. Over time, lean methodology was adopted by several industries, outside of manufacturing, including software development.
Every conversation I have with CTOs, Engineering Managers, and Tech Leaders eventually gets to the “Which Metrics Should We Measure?” discussion.
A model involving a dedicated software development team (Dedicated Team Model or, briefly, DTM) is a business model of financial collaboration that is frequently used in software development outsourcing. Taking into account the fact that many customers are interested in using this model, we decided to talk about its advantages and disadvantages, as well as highlight features that you need to know before deciding to cooperate on this model.
By Stefan Wolpers, Professional Scrum Trainer, Scrum.org
Waterfall vs Agile vs Data-driven: how the engineering leaders will track their teams1990+ Waterfall Method
Hoping to structurize your product development work process? Choosing the correct development methodology for a project depends to a great extent on your group size, objectives, and different variables. Here is a diagram of the most generally used and perceived programming development techniques to assist you with choosing which is directly for your group.
We think of Software Development as a pursuit grounded in logic. From this perspective it can be shocking that software projects have high failure rates - 31% in 2014. And some projects fail to the tune of billions. How is this level of chaos possible in an apparently logical discipline?
As the popularity of Scrum grows, so do the expectations and myths surrounding its capabilities. Exaggerated expectations often incur serious disappointments. In this post, I’ll attempt to objectively evaluate Scrum’s real capabilities, advantages, features, and, of course, limitations.
It is always worth remembering that good ideas are contagious. Other minds have wrestled with problems similar to yours before and effective solutions tend to bubble up and can be re-applied to new initiatives in ways that can often appear obvious in hindsight.
Here’s a scenario you might be familiar with. Say you’re starting a new role as a PM in a startup company (congrats!). You find that the startup has created a robust product with many different features and capabilities. Trying to gain some clarity and focus you ask: “which of those features are most/least used?”. Turns out, nobody knows. So you implement basic analytics mechanisms, wait for a week or two and then come back to the team equipped with a bunch of fancy graphs.
The concept is simple: due to a lack of resources, people sometimes do not address a problem correctly when shipping a new feature or fixing a bug. This debt must be repaid (e.g. the problem needs to be addressed correctly) or the debt will accumulate and impact the software development in the future.
In traditional software operations, software would be "thrown over the fence" to operations teams. Technical operations teams would be aided in operating a service using Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs).
Scrum is the most popular Agile framework today (56% of all Agile teams use Scrum).
Picking the right method for managing your tasks can either make or break the success of your projects.
People keep confusing agile with product development but they are different concepts. It’s important to make this distinction because it actually matters. It isn’t just semantics, the confusion is causing us all problems. Understanding this difference may fundamentally change the approach most organisations take to building digital products.
A lack of focus, lack of visibility into our codebase problems, and context switching decrease developer productivity. Here are the best ways and tools that'll help you get things done.
This post is the third article in our Tactical Guide to a Shorter Cycle Time five-part series. Read the previous post here.
Many product teams and startup founders buy into the theory of the Lean Startup, and want to “do lean” but don’t know where to start.
In this blog series, I will provide a practical guide on how to apply these principles.
TL; DR: Agile Leadership
This post is the fifth and final article in our Tactical Guide to a Shorter Cycle Time five-part series. Read the previous post here.
Something is not right. We ought to do better, I know that. But how? I think I need to consult an expert.
Every battle is won before it is fought.
~ Sun Tzu
Scrum is a buzzword, the virtue signal of choice for middle-management in software organizations.
I was 24 years old. A baby.
Scaled Agile Frameworks can take some figuring out. Let's understand SAFe. We'll see why to use it, its core elements and how it works.
If you think that a breakthrough idea, strict development deadlines, and marketing strategy are all you need to make your product hit the mark – think again. The reality is, on top of fierce competition and demanding customers, 9 out of 10 startups fail because their solution has no market fit.
Excellence in Software Engineering has never been a stationary destination where one can arrive sooner or later. It has always been a lifelong journey and learning process which demands consistency and commitment in order for someone to progress rapidly and to stay relevant over the next few years because of the ever-changing tech scenario. This element of uncertainty and demand for consistency has intrigued me since forever and hence compelled me to choose this a full-time career and what I’d like to do, at least for the foreseeable near future.
If you are using Scrum it’s safe to say that you are also using Agile.
Most people’s story about looking for Asana alternatives:
If Jira seems disappointing to you and your team, in this quite lengthy article you’ll discover the best Jira alternatives.
Top of the best tools for remote work: Telegram, Getscreen.me, Trello and others. These software needed to work effectively from home.
I was recently asked to engage in a debate over whether or not there are deadlines in agile. There were a few folks involved in the debate and the predominant perspective seemed to be that true agile efforts have no external deadlines - all deadlines are self-imposed by the team in the form of an iteration commitment or a scope negotiation with the Product Owner.
Ok, so here is the situation: you work in a team, and each developer works with a local environment. Or you have multiple environments. Or... We don't care. The only thing is, you have to handle different versions of databases, and you don't know how to do this safely and efficiently.
A postmortem is the analysis of an event after it occurs.
Software and hardware teams rely on each other. If they can learn from each other then benefits will be felt throughout an entire organization.
Process gates are a common leadership trap you may not even realize you’re making: adding steps that require someone to do something. They often backfire!
Genuine deadlines are there to help the organization seize an opportunity. Let's explore how they impact engineering organization and how not to antagonize them
When we started MarkUp, a visual collaboration tool for digital content, we expected to see user growth from much of the design and developer communities, because of the problem we are solving in those fields.
Let's learn about Agile Development via these 57 free stories. They are ordered by most time reading created on HackerNoon.
The Nightmare Before Christmas. We’ve seen it over and over again (if you still haven’t seen it, you should probably stop reading this). By now, you know all the songs by heart and, somehow, keep laughing at all the silly little jokes. Well, here’s a version of the story you probably haven’t heard before.
We are in the age of the Agile revolution, even non-tech companies and non-tech departments are adopting agile practices and frameworks. The issue is that organizations are making these adoptions without changing the foundation that their companies are built on. One of these major pillars is performance appraisals and it is critical because it is very important to employees. We all want to do well, and get big bonuses, or even get that promotion that we have been working so hard towards. The issue is most companies do not have the Agile mindset and focus mainly on the individual and neglect the team aspect when it comes to performance. This directly hurts organizations that are looking to build mature Agile teams.
A couple of days ago, I was struck by a colleague’s point about how confusing it can be when listening to people who have strong but conflicting opinions about various agile practices. The remark was brought about by a discussion concerning the pros and cons of different estimation techniques, and whether or not you should even practice estimation at all. It was a great conversation, but I can see how someone with less experience or minimal exposure to the techniques we were talking about could be left feeling very lost.
How to estimate work efforts that are not well-defined yet, but the business needs them.
Jailbreak Checkrain Checkra1n Security Scam Malware
With DevOps and Continuous Delivery gaining traction, are the principles behind Lean and Agile still relevant? How do they compare to the 5 Continuous...
Many businesses still use a rigorous, top-down procedure approach to manage complex tasks. In this blog, we'll look at how to get the best result for project.
11/3/2022: Top 5 stories on the Hackernoon homepage!
Searching for the top Agile Methodology Trends 2022? Explore this blog to check out the Top 11 Agile Methodology Trends with benefits for 2022 and beyond.
The story "How We Recreate the Idea of Educational Content [Part #1]" you can read here.
Few industry trends have been as disruptive as the Agile software development revolution. But the same wave of innovation that’s allowed dev teams to get more value into the hands of users faster has left the majority of non-technical teams across the business reeling.
Your product roadmapping is a viable means to depict how this product is prone to develop, to adjust the stakeholders, and to procure a money related arrangement for this product. In any case, making a powerful guide is difficult, especially in agile development, where changes happen as often as possible and often out of the blue. In this way, there are things never to overlook while making your roadmap and sprint backlog. Remembering them will help you in making an intense agile product using scrum sprint backlog, the roadmap template and other powerful product management tools.
An overview of the MLOps and AIOps worlds to understand what they mean, how they relate to DevOps, and how they compare in terms of benefits.
Hold daily standups. Ideally, this will take an hour every day.
The Cynefin Framework helps leaders to make decisions in context, distinguishing different domains to match the reality before apply the right management tool.
If you are new to Agility and Retrospective, I’ll offer in this post a novel introduction to it. We will explore how retrospectives and your team organization can take inspiration from A/B Testing.
We’re right on the precipice of a reality that’s more agile than Agile — as we move from Agile development and a DevOps culture to autonomous development
Shorter development cycles and faster innovation are the basic characteristics of the DevOps model. It has swept the market with new ideas and incredible solutions, leading to 74% adoption by global enterprises. The reasons are different, but the top ones are the ability to recover from a failure in less than 60 minutes, minimization of support cases by 37%, and overall need to “put out fires”. No wonder that Quality Assurance, as a stage of the software development process, had to adapt to the new reality of the DevOps model and change its traditional approaches.
By Wai Ling Ko, Professional Scrum Trainer, Scrum.org
Agile, Flow, and a Filter
Scrum is the most used Agile framework in software development. and more than 56% of companies now started adopting the Scrum framework.
Recently, I had achieved the Professional Scrum Master I(PSM I) assessment on my first attempt. I answered 77 questions correctly, acquiring 96.3%. So let me share my experience with you in the next few lines to know more about how to be a certified Scrum master.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology is too far evolved to still be relying on basic, word cloud analysis for your survey data
Although test automation was not created with Agile in mind, it does enable Agile testing, which is an important part of the Agile idea.
Since the rise of the Agile Era, putting the user in the center of product definition process became the standard for most companies. User stories are one of the basic tools that help us keep the user in mind while defining the product and its features.
Whenever you are learning some new technology, I believe that you should start from very basics.
Agile Methodology is the underlying ideology for how software delivery should take place.
Finding a Scrum Master is simple and complex. There are plenty of people out there who call themselves “Scrum Masters”, but how do you know if the person you are hiring really is a great Scrum Master?
Product managers have a dangerous role because of one oft-missed truth: Decisions about what to build are far more costly than most teams realize.
The three key positions in a software development team are developer, tester, and operations. Required tasks among these positions are continuously reinvented.
Are you using online whiteboards? Here are five reasons why you should and how they can positively affect your business.
What's the difference between the two most used approaches to PBI estimation? Learn what they are so that you can decide which one fits your team better.
Not all bosses are leaders. Right? There’s the difference between managing and leading? An oft-quoted talent expert Marcus Buckingham, saying “people leave managers, not companies.” According to a recent study by Robert Half, 49% of employees surveyed have quit their posts because of a bad boss.
By Andreea Jakab, Bigstep
The agile software development model means releasing software faster, but that doesn't mean you can skip out on quality.
Disclaimer: This is based on conversations, anecdotal evidence and personal opinion. This is not backed by statistical evidence. But neither is the cargo cult around estimations (to my knowledge). 🤷🏻♀️
I have been involved recently in Agile transformation, i went through lots of conversations, with Techy people, that have a lot of misconceptions about Agile.
The state of affairs
If you decide to outsource the development of the project, you must understand the specifics of this format of cooperation with the agency. You cannot fully control the “inner kitchen” of the project creation, will it be a startup or software for a large enterprise. But this is not necessary, as experienced agencies ensure the transparency and continuity of all work processes. They maintain constant communication with the client and resolve issues as they become available.
It is good to have a scrum master involved in your agile process, but what makes a great scrum master? In this article we look to break down the fundamental pieces to becoming the best scrum master you are capable of being. First, we must define what a scrum master is.
Agile software development is an iterative approach to technology design and development.
The need for a cohesive team is imperative and for many, that means installing an ITSM system for the first time and using Agile methodology.
Want to know how to be a good Product Owner? Get to know responsibilities and read tips for better communication with clients and teams. Agile Development 101!
My last job in Brazil before moving to the UK was at ThoughtWorks. While I didn’t agree with everything that they did there (OMG… Java, please no! ^_^’’’) there is one thing about ThoughtWorks that is incontestable: they are very good with processes.
What are the key leadership qualities that inspire teams to build amazing products?
The world is continuously moving towards intelligence, digitalization, and robotics. But what are the factors that are making these things possible?
One of the last questions asked in a DevOps interview is usually "so, what does DevOps mean to you?" I think this is a smart question, because DevOps is wildly misunderstood by the greater IT community. Some may answer that it's Continuous Integration and Releases, another may say it's having everything in Git, and the last might say that it's having tests available. All of these technical solutions do represent a key aspect of DevOps which is the tool chain, but it is the least important.
Last week we hosted a webinar where I interviewed Adam Tornhill, CTO & Co-founder of CodeScene, about technical debt: what is it, why is it important, and how to manage it effectively.
Seems like everything has been written about effective one-on-one meetings. There are classes available, workshops suggesting ultimate know-hows, and experts offering their services to corporate and HR managers.
I have read multiple definitions for Lead Time and Cycle Time over the last years. Recently, I shared why I prefer using the first over the later.
It’s easy to pay lip service to company culture. But few companies actively consider those few cultural characteristics that make a meaningful difference to performance—because that’s the hard part.
A couple of weeks ago I created an automation to change the light in my living room for when I played video games.
Making agile work at scale is ultimately about changing behavior, not just for the individual contributors involved, but also for the leaders.
Read this blog to discover the relevance of the On-Premise deployment model, as well as collaboration tools like Troop Messenger, AnyDesk, etc. that support it.
“Lean” is a buzzword that has been making the rounds in the startup world for a few years now. There have been numerous books written that talk about it. Some prominent ones are The Lean Startup, The Startup Owner’s Manual, The Lean Product Playbook. The spirit that this word conveys is very simple though. It essentially wants to minimize wasted efforts and resources.
Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery in the development process. How the CI/CD pipeline helps create products and implement new features better and fast
This article describes a model for writing engaging user stories that can be used to assist with team productivity, product quality, and user experience goals.
Just got a heart-warming email from GitHub about their Sponsors program!
If you aren't an educated and/or experienced tech person, a lot of question marks may pop up in your mind while looking at these two terms: Lean and Agile. Even if you are technically proficient, you may wonder what the difference between these two really is.
A software development methodology is a set of methods used in the creation of software.
The new decade began with an unprecedented number of natural disasters, including Puerto Rico Earthquakes, Yemen Humanitarian Crisis, Australian Bushfires, Floods in Indonesia, the outbreak of coronavirus, and others.
Scrum is an increasingly popular way to manage projects, and for a good reason. It can help your small teams deliver higher quality products faster and more efficiently than before.
Scrum methodology brings team members together to implement an agile
framework for the successful completion of the task. Professionals love it because its unique features reduce the efforts of developers without declining their efficiency. It encourages learning and improving through experiences and mistakes where each team member sorts out any work-related problems.
How do the big tech companies and unicorn startups succeed in agile product development while maintaining code quality.
One of the many responsibilities of any great engineering leader or manager is that of making decisions. In terms of how to best do that, there are many decision-making models, including the OODA loop model.
Let's look at the differences between unit tests and integration tests and when you might prefer one or the other.
Businesses continue to move forward on the digital acceleration path provoked by the pandemic, which means the demand for software testing will increase. What t
Before the pandemic, roughly 30% of the part-time workforce was working remotely. It is estimated this will expand to at least 48% post-pandemic. Until the pandemic is over, it’s unclear exactly how much of the full-time workforce that can work remotely will continue to do so.
In the agile development methodology, the velocity of testing holds the key to delivering the best quality software within the stipulated budget and time constr
Eduardo Mignot from Spain has been nominated for a 2020#Noonie in the Future Heroes and Technology categories.
Why do we so often ask teams to estimate in detail how much effort is required to build a product, and to that upfront? There’s evidence that this lead us to output-oriented thinking, premature optimization, bloat and generally a commitment to suboptimal solutions that are designed with too many assumptions and a lack of clarity on the problem space.
Every few years, a fresh banana peel is dropped by well-meaning experts.
“I would describe an engineering manager as a Sergeant Major. They are very much part of the mission delivery team and manage a group of experts to perform specific tasks,” says David Ives, Engineering Manager at Pusher.
One of the things, I had decided, was that during the lockdown I would sharpen my skills around Product Management. For this, I have been religiously attending many webinars and doing some online courses. One of the courses that hit the chord was this course
Tech debt is deferred work for later. Think of technical debt as analogous to financial debt. It's not just the way they are named. If you have a debt — there i
This story covers basic GitHub Jira Integration without requiring admin privileges to install apps on Jira.
What is Agile Data-Driven?
Scrimba is an online platform to learn to code from real teachers. But unlike the many other competitors, their secret sauce is that they’ve developed a unique technology that lets teachers record their screencasts so students can stop at any point and jump directly into editing the code. In this way it’s similar to being taught with a tutor right next to you. Pretty neat!
What are the attributes of a great Product Manager? That’s a question we recently asked ourselves at Zencity when we were looking to add another PM to the team. Some attributes are a part of a person’s character. Things like curiosity, sharp thinking and a relentless pursuit of truth. Those traits might be developed and enhanced, but for the most part — you either have them or not. Other attributes have to do with the knowledge the person obtained.
Serenity now, Insanity later, is valuable advice about controlling emotions but within this statement is an important guideline for delivering agile software.
Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.
Methodology to enable fast development of robust enterprise applications applying Test-Driven Development (TDD) and Hexagonal Architecture.
How to do milestone identification, project plans, risk registries, and project updates.
Testing is the backbone of the Agile software development methodology. The efficiency of the testing process directly impacts the quality of the deliverables and the goodwill of the organization. Buggy software can lead to poor user experience, delayed project timelines, diminished brand value, and revenue losses.
These are the best ways to develop a successful continuous testing strategy for Agile teams as the world shifts away from traditional waterfall models.
Tips to succeed at software Engineering Team Management
You know that feeling when you work really hard on something for really long and it feels like nobody really notices? Hacker Noon’s Annual Tech Industry Awards, the 2020 Noonies, are here to help with that.
Software development is a complicated process. Using specific KPIs in software development can make the procedure more manageable.
I occasionally (and usually accidentally) find myself in a discussion about whether or not every story should be a shippable increment of work. Recently, I got involved (deliberately) in the discussion when I was invited to answer the question, “...should a user story correspond to a potentially shippable product increment?” on Quora.
People assume they know what technical debt is, however, almost no-one understands it.
The advantages of moving security into the DevOps lifecycle early are well-studied. For example, Puppet’s 2019 State of DevOps Report details numerous ways that both security and DevOps improve when security is integrated into DevOps earlier (aka: Shift Left).
The Challenge
“In these unprecedented times…” People build unprecedented products, and contribute to the internet in unprecedented ways. Go on, make a fellow human’s day and nominate the best YOUR best of 2020’s tech industry for a 2020 #Noonie, the tech industry’s most independent
and community-driven awards: NOONIES.TECH. One such impressive human is Ori Keren from Israel: 2020 Noonie nominee in Future Heroes and Technology categories.
An article that I read recently stated that 41% of businesses struggle to turn data into decisions. This got me thinking about my own experience with product analytics.
I know its conventional to open a new blog with some kind of declarative statement or thesis, but I want to start with a question. If you were to measure just one thing about your team, one metric that best captures “the human element” what would it be?
Everyone knows startups need to move fast. It is often part of their advantage against larger and more traditional companies. But what does moving fast really m
Agile principles and values can be applied to the way you approach data science projects
The complete guide to hacking the setup of your scrum team and start delivering business value in 48 hours.
From the desk of brilliant weirdo #1: “What does a project manager really do?” Maybe that’s a question you’ve been asking yourself or others if you have been considering a PM career for a while. To be honest, it’s gonna be quite hard to put all the PM roles under one roof as project managers in one industry can differ from PMs in another. But I’ll do my best to give you a clear image of what it looks like to be a project manager.
Tell me what you want. Or tell me how to do it. Don’t tell me both
Product management is more of an art than a science, and its unique deliverables depend largely on the personality of the product manager.
I’ve tech-led teams at Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter. I’m also a licensed private pilot and have found that there are many lessons from flying that can benefit software engineering teams. In this post, I’d like to share some of these lessons while also providing you an insight into aviation.
This is what it would be
Human beings are not very good at seeing into the future. Unless you have a crystal ball or know how to read tea leaves, trying to predict when an event will happen with any degree of accuracy is very difficult.
Sometimes, when working in a team or open source organization, you may misspell a message or make errors in your repository's commits
Learn how you can become an agileish superhero. Discover your super learning, super memory, and super thinking superpowers.
It seems clear that the world is going to be different after the Covid19 crisis is over. I think it behooves us to make sure it’s a good different. Businesses large and small are going to be facing so many headwinds that we desperately need to cut loose some of our anchors to offset. This might seem like the wrong time to implement change, but if we don’t shed some of our bad habits, we’ll never rise to these challenges.
Explainer videos are a powerful marketing tool for tech companies as they can effectively explain a technology product, service, or a company itself.
I interviewed Adam Tornhill, CTO & Co-founder of CodeScene, about technical debt: what is it, why is it important, and how to manage it effectively?
In today’s Quality Sense episode, Federico has a conversation about DevOps and testing with Sumit Agarwal, the Lead Cloud Architect for a global tech company.
Agile stepped in when linear requirement-based processes were playing around to impose project management processes and predictable delivery methodologies across complex software domain, driven by time and output. Even with a certain percentage of success, Agile hasn't managed to kill off the embedded waterfall behaviors, prescribed linear plans and over-complex management layers for delivering software en masse.
In “Alice in Wonderland” we are invited to escape reality by tumbling into a whimsical world of nonsense. I found in this story a good analogy for PMs.
Ah, business metrics… To me, it’s the best illustration of how information overload can do more harm than good. A brief online search will provide you with dozens of “key, important, essential business metrics that every company should know”.
Buddy is the underdog of the CI/CD world. It's a frustrating world, filled with broken Jenkins servers and exhausting CodeBuild UIs. I discovered Buddy about a year ago and I've been raving about it ever since. It offers a different approach to a complex, difficult problem.
We’re going to look at what sprint velocity is, how it can affect your development cycle, and what formulas you can use to measure sprint velocity.
If you can’t answer it, don’t worry, you’re not alone. Many engineering leaders couldn’t tell you without some significant number-crunching. Gaining visibility into performance is only half the battle though. Knowing how to interpret metrics and how to apply them to improving performance is where the magic happens. Many CEOs do not know how to align engineering metrics to business KPIs (revenue, customer retention, etc.). Bringing metrics to your board or non-technical CEO for the first time may be challenging if you are unable to help them bridge the gap.
Lean production is not a new concept. It comes from the manufacturing industry and was polished by Toyota in the seventies. However, Lean manufacturing principles turned out to be so practical and universal that they can be used to create innovations in other industries as well. In the Information Technology (IT) sphere, they are frequently used with the Six Sigma Principles, and in this article, we will explain what each principle means for Lean software development.
It could be tricky to prioritise hundreds of user stories in spreadsheet or Jira, you need to know which of them are the highest value features are so that you can build them next. An advanced technique to organise stories is more preferred than a messy product backlog. This is how a user story map can help in a simple way to tell story and break it down into parts.
Can anyone be a Product Owner (PO)? What’s the best position in the company to fill that role? With Scrum you have one and only one product owner for a given product – not a committee, but the effectiveness of the product owner will vary depending on the PO’s organizational enablement, understanding of the product, and involvement with the Scrum Team.
Most of us who have worked on IT projects feel the resonance of Hofstadter's Law:
All engineering teams strive to build the best product they can as quickly as possible. Some, though, stumble into a false dichotomy of choosing between speed and quality. While that choice may have been necessary in the past, it’s not the case today.
My aim is to offer practical strategies to make planning a sprint less painful so that you'll feel organized rather than overwhelmed by your technical debt.
Physical textbooks are reprinted once a year at best according to the waterfall process. Their content becomes outdated way before it’s published. And if a textbook is not commercially successful, it means financial losses for the company. One of the solutions is to create digital content right from the start, not just digitalize published content. This would allow for updates on the spot and the creation of customized materials that can be then published.
When the software first appeared, it was all delivered in boxes. Such software had a finite state. 20 years after that, it already seemed ridiculous. Today we're building systems that can be perfected endlessly. This begs the question: "When does the work end?" - and that question is difficult to answer. We are looking for an answer to this question because it will help us answer other, even more important questions. Will the team receive its award or will it be reprimanded? Will the team do something new? Will the stakeholder benefit from it?
The purpose of every product is to be fully functional without forcing users to invest too much time and energy in the process. This is exactly why UX and agile methodologies play such an important role in the 21st century business – everybody wants to design a product that maximizes functionality while minimizing consumers’ efforts.
Before the 2000s, software development was mostly done in a Waterfall approach. This meant that a software project would be shipped after going through a few long stages such as analysis, development and QA, just to name a few. This led to slow software development cycles and, consequently, improper decisions were made in the early stages of the lifecycle, leading to poor or unfit software.
Recognizing that you have technical debt is easy. And if you don’t recognize it already, one of your engineers will likely tell you:)
Software developers are mostly happy to work by themselves at night in dark rooms. And they turn coffee, cola and pizza into code.
By Stefan Wolpers, Professional Scrum Trainer, Scrum.org
Agile is such a popular philosophy which more and more development teams use. Actually, they use Agile methods such as Scrum, Extreme Programming, Crystal Clear etc. But, why is Agile so popular? Let's find out!
The following article is based on a talk Juan Pablo Buriticá, VP of Engineering at Splice, gave at our annual Engineering Leadership Conference and a subsequent interview. Watch the full talk here, and see the slides here.
On Friday, I attended this webinar by Atlassian on Enterprise Agility and Innovation at Scale. The event highlighted how a bank of 160 years with processes embedded deeply into their core business is transforming itself. Through changing its leadership mindsets, teams formation, focus on customers, process improvements and usage of Agile tools, etc. It showcases how they embrace the concept of AGILE effectively and partially highlight their digital transformation journey.
When we're prioritizing, we're trying to answer the question "What, among all the stories we could work on right now, is the best possible use of our time?" The obvious answer is to say "The story that adds most value to our users". This answer only leads to more questions such as:
It is extremely difficult to make an accurate project estimation. It requires skills as well as experience. You need to consider the deliverables, tasks, and processes in order to create a workable estimate. Making a precise project estimation also requires a good relationship with the client, because you need to be clear on their requirements, according to which the estimation is made.
In this post, I will try to answer 2 questions.
Scrum is a set of rules for organizing a flexible workflow, which consists of a team approach, working in iterations, focusing on the goal of each iteration.
A common debate in the Agile community is how important or not Standups are, and what their structure should be.
Code Reviews in a remote-driven world yield a better software design and solution. Find out why that is the case in this latest article by John Vester.
Raji Arasu is the visionary mind and engineering leader that occupies the position of SVP of Engineering at Intuit, making her one of the few female leaders at a major technology company. She is aware of this thing and supports women leaders in technology both within the company and across the industry.
In our previous blog post, we wrote about Agile, a philosophy for managing projects and teams. In that text, we mentioned Agile methods, one of them being Scrum.
One may not expect to use Salesforce for Planning Poker sessions, but see how Aditya Naag's planning-poker-salesforce repository can make this happen quite easily.
Discussions on the November 2020 release of the Scrum Guide
Most of the time, engineers get poor bug reports that they cannot act upon.
Believe most of us are already aware of what is expected of a Product Manager profile in any internet company, starting from being a mini CEO of the product to be the interface between business, UX & technology. Here in addition to those common attributes of a PM profile I am going to point out few not so common traits but important qualities a Product Manager should possess.
During the last several years working in the global corporate world I have come across a repeating challenge for distributed coders to efficiently work together as early as the beginning of their ramp up.
Does your team feel its alignment with business where what it delivers solve business problems and achieve business desired outcome?
And their 4 areas of responsibility
A tribe of Cannibals arrives at New York City.
The worst thing we can do in Sprint Planning is to initiate it with the question, “How many tasks can we fit in this Sprint?”
As far as software development is concerned, We have two types of methodologies: Agile or Non-Agile. So, let us get brief information about both methodologies.
In this article, you’ll learn what velocity means in the context of an agile/scrum methodology and how you can improve it to allow your team to move faster and
COVID-19 has severely challenged a core tenet of the Agile movement: the importance of face-to-face communication. But instead of slowing Agile teams down, herein lies an opportunity to improve the fundamentals of an efficient workplace, writes Clifford Berg
Try our problem statement guide to ease team collaboration & prioritization process. Develop a distinct workflow and bring order. Get synched and result-driven. Make your team understand what they do and why.
This post is the first article in our Tactical Guide to a Shorter Cycle Time five-part series.
Traditional thinking about software quality might not help in really getting the full value out of Agile practices. Let's find out why.
Extreme Programming promotes small releases through continuous integration(CI) and other extreme programming practices.
In this article, you will find some tips to streamline and improve your Agile testing strategy.
This blog post should not be considered authoritative in any way. It simply an imperfect attempt to highlight some guiding principles. I am convinced these guiding principles could be useful for you, your dear-ones and your team.
Imagine the philosophies of Socrates, Plato, Confucius, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius all combined into a one-pager. That's the Agile manifesto for you...
I was asked to answer the Quora question, “Why is the Agile model the best”.
By far, the top reason startups fail is the lack of market need (42% of the cases). Many startups are founded based on unique technologies, or on problems that are interesting to solve, but don’t necessarily answer a real market need. Understanding what market you are serving, and the problem you are addressing is key. The basis for that is early, continuous feedback from the right people who fit the early adopter profile.
Release early, release often — just don’t forget to refactor ;)
Agile can be defined as the ability to move quickly and easily. However, for those in tech they might associate agile with something else entirely. Agile methodology is a popular framework for managing software development projects. More specifically, it is a style of project management where you develop a product in short cycles (or sprints- see above image), providing flexibility for revisions as necessary. It requires constant improvement through these iterations of testing and reflection. A finished product is better than a perfect project.
If it brings no value to users, chances are, no one will use it.
User stories are brief, informal descriptions of a feature told from user POV.
Do you want to prioritize your tasks? Explore the blog and get the list of 10 most popular prioritization techniques and methods of agile product development.
Use weekly project plans to improve your agile team's ability to plan and reason about the future.
Why you shouldn’t follow all these things
Why relying more on juniors and less on seniors is essential in dealing with systems debt before the problem goes completely out of the team's control.
“Our analysis is clear: in today’s fast-moving and competitive world, the best thing you can do for your products, your company, and your people is institute a culture of experimentation and learning, and invest in the technical and management capabilities that enable it.” – Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim, Accelerate.
This post is the fourth article in our Tactical Guide to a Shorter Cycle Time five-part series. Read the previous post here.
You are the regional supervisor of ABC Co. and part of your job is to inspect different job sites.
The three keys outlined in this article will help product managers in agency settings implement Agile more effectively.
Our team started to apply DevOps practices long before we registered Mad Devs as a company. Specifically, I ran into this approach more than 10 years ago in a different company where I worked as a System Administrator.
Long-term strategic planning is a remnant of the past that can’t reflect the fast pace of the digital world we live in today. Companies that implement an Agile approach, shift to delivering results in a short time all the while remaining flexible enough to adjust to any changes as they come. This calls for a completely different attitude in planning with the focus on short term goals that spin out for no longer than a few weeks or even days. Moreover, Scaled Agile helps manage the growing complexity and scaling of businesses to any size and number of distributed teams introducing new methods and tools, one such being Program Increment planning or PI planning for short.
The traditional work model, 9 to 5 in an office with the whole company face to face, is going the way of the dodo bird. For a number of businesses thriving in the 21st century, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
We observe an increasing share of distributed teams and the growing popularity of remote work. And there seems to be some contradiction, as at the first glance Agile and distributed teams do not merge well. The Agile methodology is laid down in the famous Agile Manifesto and is based on the twelve principles derived from it.
How Jira, Hygger, Asana, and Others Surprised Their Users in 2019?
When your team is building a software product, the majority of the work that they do is invisible. As a manager, you have to rely on in-person cues for blocked work or frustrated engineers. When they move to a remote workflow—your team also becomes invisible, and all those critical signals are dropped.
In-person, you might notice:
Agile methods are used in one or another way in various areas of business. Many teams use these techniques for developing, marketing and organizing their work. One of the basics of every Agile method is Sprint. It is an iteration or cycle used in delivering work results. But it'll be wrong to think, that you can achieve something big just by dividing your work into periods. You should also plan these periods to achieve a win by the end of the Sprint.
In October 2019 with the mentorship of a dear friend, I made the decision to become a Product Manager starting with a PM certification course and the knowledge that I would have to start my career afresh and work my way up from the lowest rank on the totem. This is what I’ve done. I transitioned from my usual Executive Assistant role which was great but not very challenging creatively.
As a founder with a developer background, I was frequently asked for recommendations of outsourced tech teams. A long time ago I co-founded a Ukrainian software house, before handing business to my partner in 2016.
Agile software development means different things to different people. In this post, we will define what agile software development is with a simple analogy that a five-year-old can understand. The analogy we will use is as straightforward as serving an apple to 4 kids. Yes, it will be that easy, let’s get started:
By Barry Overeem, Professional Scrum Trainer, Scrum.org
In our previous blog post, we wrote about Agile, a philosophy for managing projects and teams. In that text, we mentioned Agile methods, one of them being Scrum.
Scrum Alliance, scrum.org, and ICAgile are some of the best Scrum certification providers in the market. Certifications from a reputable source provide insight.
A lot has been said about chatbots and their effects on practically every industry. The field of HR is going through a major revamp with the use of artificial intelligence. Employees are recruited, onboarded, and even terminated with these little bots.
The software development process is complicated and, at times, chaotic. To make it less so, all its stages must be well-organized, planned, and agreed upon. Miscommunication, lack of clarity, and missed deadlines will jeopardize any project.
Most agile teams do sprint retrospectives at least once a month, to iterate and improve on their software development process and workflow. However, a lot of those same teams rely only on their feelings to “know” if they have actually improved. But you need an unbiased reference system if you want to compare how two sprints went.
From the desk of a brilliant weirdo #1:
This post is the second article in our Tactical Guide to a Shorter Cycle Time five-part series. Read the previous post here.
