Waterfall vs. Agile | Secure Software Development. I’ve been a fan of Agile methodologies for quite some time now. As an Agilist, I would scoff at the Waterfall process I was taught during my studies. I did read a couple of times that the original paper introducing the Waterfall model wasn’t really supportive of it at all, but I’d never read that paper myself. Until now. Here’s what I found what its author, Dr. Winston Royce, has to say. Attitude The heart of software development is analysis and coding, “since both steps involve genuinely creative work which directly contributes to the usefulness of the final product.” There are big problems with Waterfall Royce then goes on to introduce the other steps, ending up with what we now call Waterfall. But there is a much worse problem. But these can be fixed Stunningly, though, Royce goes on to claim “However, I believe the illustrated approach to be fundamentally sound.”
The do it twice trick is also used a lot in Agile. Like this: Like Loading... Scrumpatternssummary - www. Aggregate Velocity - Published Patterns. Aggregate Velocity... your product has grown to multiple teams, each one of which was drawn from the single, original team whose velocity had stabilized. The Product Owner wants to establish a new velocity for the Product Backlog. You need to know the development velocity to establish release schedules and to estimate delivery ranges for PBIs. In a single-team Scrum you can use that team's velocity, but what do you do in a multi-team Scrum?
Each team has its own velocity, and these velocities cannot trivially be averaged or normalized with each other. Just as there is a gestalt effect between team members that contributes to the high velocity of a team, so there are non-linear influences between multiple coordinated teams that can either increase or decrease their collective effectiveness. During sprint planning, team members collectively estimate on the product backlog based on their intuition and past experience as a team. Assume that each PBI is estimated by only a single team. Five Tips for Impediment Resolution with Scrum.
Impediments can slow down or even halt the progress of an otherwise well-functioning Scrum team. Let's take a look at the most common challenges that crop up on teams and what steps you can take to resolve them. Problems: If the impediment backlog lives in the mysterious black book of the ScrumMaster, you have a problem. If your impediment backlog does not change you have a problem. 1. Write the impediments on a flipchart or index cards and attach them to a wall in the team room near the taskboard. Putting impediments near the taskboard creates a nice opportunity for you as the ScrumMaster to give information during the Daily Scrum, like “I resolved impediment X. 2.
There is no such thing as a team without impediments -- every team could perform faster. Whenever there is no movement on the taskboard during the Daily Scrum, it is likely that there is an impediment. Ask the team about these things and you will discover the impediment. 3. 4. 5. The Agile Inception Deck « The Agile Warrior. Download Blank Inception Deck (pptx). One area most agile methods are completely silent on is project chartering. Below is a lightweight you can use to fill this gap and get your project headed in the right direction long before the first line of code every gets written. 10 questions to ask at the start of your next project It starts out so hopefully.
As you begin the project, you and your team are all on the same page. Or so it seems. How many of your projects start off like this: You and your team get together at the start of your project thinking you are all on the same page? And when you start building something, you realize you were thinking something completely different. This happens all the time on projects: assuming there is consensus when none exists. While good teams can roll with these punches and adapt as they go, it’s a form of waste that can hurt or kill the unwary before they even get out of the gate.
These questions serve two goals: alignment and expectation setting. 1. 2. 3. ScrumReferenceCard.pdf. Why use Tasks? « Agile Development Presentation | Main | Porters! Presort! » June 08, 2007 Why use Tasks? As we coach software development teams in Kansas City, we are often asked about the process of breaking User Stories down into development tasks (anything related to implementing and verify a User Story). This is one of the areas teams struggle with when adopting an Agile process. 1) Iteration Planning Tasks are a good last check for iteration planning purposes.
During planning, openly discussing development tasks gives all team members a view of what will take place while implementing the stories selected for the iteration. 2) Iteration Burndown (what's left <how many hours> to do within a given iteration) Having tasks with hours estimates enables the team to discuss (during the Daily Stand Up meeting) why certain tasks might be taking longer than planned, why some tasks were overlooked when a story was initially discussed, why some tasks weren't ultimately needed. 3) Accountability 8) Talk to the Dog.
Agile estimation – story points vs. hours « epistemologic. Once again, discussions at work have driven me to write this. This time, the topic of debate (or rather, amusement) is that in an agile team, hours (or days) and not story points are a better way to estimate user stories. I disagree. Developers are, in general, more aware of the potential complexities that they can run into in the process of implementing a story. Despite this cognizance, it is often hard to predict exactly what these complexities might be. Obviously, if a developer knew the exact nature of the issues that he will run into, he can account for those and predict exactly how much time the work might take. Since this knowledge can never be complete, no developer can determine the exact amount of time needed. Further, depending on the specific process being used in a given team, it is possible that the developer(s) who estimated a given story is not the one who ends up actually doing the implementation.
Like this: Like Loading... Picking Agile vs. Waterfall “Projects”: a Ten Point Quiz. | Scaling Software Agility. Posted on March 4, 2011 by Dean Leffingwell in Enterprise Rollout For some reason, I woke up today realizing that I have been working with, and writing exclusively about, enterprise scale software agility full time now for five years running. I’ve had the fantastic opportunity to work with some of the world’s largest enterprises, each adopting agile at scale. Some of these initiatives were extremely successful, some quite successful, and a few, less successful than we had hoped. (We’ll return to that latter topic later in this post.) I also woke up with a “bee in my bonnet” (pick your own, more contemporary idiom here….) about a topic that has come up repeatedly in the last few weeks. The topic is this: As agile moves across the chasm from the innovators and early adopters to the early majority, In some cases, I’m even peripherally involved in picking the best projects for agile implementation.
There, I have that off my chest. OK, now back to the discussion of “less successful” projects. Agile Product Ownership in a nutshell. This is basically a 1 day product ownership course compressed into a 15 minute animated presentation. There’s obviously more to product ownership than this, so see this is a high level summary. Here’s the complete drawing (.png format)Here’s a downloadable version of the video, in case you don’t want to stream (.mov format, 90 Mb) Special thanks to Alistair Cockburn, Tom & Mary Poppendieck, Jeff Patton, Ron Jeffries, Jeff Sutherland, and Michael Dubakov for providing many of the models, metaphors, and ideas that I use in this presentation.
Translations: (see also the translation guide by Cédric Chevalerias) French (subtitles)French (voice)German (subtitles)German (voice)Portuguese (voice)Spanish (subtitles) Below is a full transcript in english. Let’s talk about Agile software development from the perspective of the Product Owner. Here’s Pat. Here are the stakeholders. The stakeholder needs are expressed as user stories. Now, somebody has to BUILD the system. This queue needs to be managed. Henrik Kniberg. I debug, refactor, and optimize IT companies. And jam alot too. Friendly Guide to Climate Change (and what you can do about it) I’ve spent ALOT of time the past few months trying to understand climate change and global warming, and how to effectively contribute. I’ve dug through 1000-page scientific reports, talked to experts, and basically tried to digest as much information as possible. I was surprised by how little I knew before. I’m convinced that, the more people who really understand the problem, the more effectively we’ll be able to solve it (or at least mitigate it).
So here’s a short animated video summarizing the whole issue. Please help spread it as widely as possible! I hope this video will inspire many people to make small changes, and a few people to make big changes. Read more Effective carbon offsetting – what we’ve learned and what we’re doing Flying causes global warming. Fly as little as possible. The obvious question then is – HOW do you carbon offset? OK, so now what? 10 Things to Drive Your ScrumMaster Crazy. Game « Agile Belgium. Want to learn about… the planning game? Velocity? Story estimation? Short releases? Making predictable plans? How to explain these things in your company? Want to… play the planning game? The XP Game is a playful way to familiarize the players with some of the more difficult concepts of the XP Planning Game, like velocity, story estimation, yesterday’s weather and the cycle of life.
Want to know more? Then you’re ready to go to the detailed description. The XP Game is developed by Vera Peeters (Tryx) and Pascal Van Cauwenberghe (Nayima). Feedback? Scrum Simulation with LEGO. Wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Scrum-Simulation-with-LEGO-Bricks-v2.0.pdf. Play the Scrum Simulation (based on XPGame) for Great Learning. A couple of weeks ago, I needed to run a workshop for some people new to Agile. My initial plan was to use the XPGame by Vera Peeters and Pascal Van Cauwenberghe. It’s really great, but it’s XP (not that there’s anything wrong with that). From my perspective the process part of XP is almost indistinguishable from Scrum (except that Scrum provides more safety by making some things explicit).
I thought I would be OK to use with my client who is transitioning to Scrum (+XP). Initially I thought it would be healthy to present the XP-perspective since it is not that different. I got really great feedback from the folks who attended and someone from Agile 2009 was looking for this so I thought I had better post my notes. 2 Hour Agile Introduction and Simulation The audience was people who were new to Agile. Next 90 minutes – The simulation described below. Pre-production: Learn the XPGame The first thing to do is read through the manual and the rest of the goodies in the XPGame. Story Estimation.