One might wonder why it’s not so easy to adopt agile engineering practices and to achieve technical excellence. When we think of practices, we tend to think of simple things: sticking a shopping list on the fridge with a magnet, having a clear and prioritized list of things to do, and doing them in that order. Why is it then that with Agile practices, things don’t work out quite so well?
Story point is a arbitrary relative measure used by Scrum teams to define the effort required to implement one story. In this article, Mahfoud Amiour proposes an approach to measure the cost of story points implementation.
Even if Agile was initially considered as an anarchic approach due to practices like self-organization, the reality is that it requires a lot of discipline. Metrics is an important tool to assess the continuous improvement efforts of Scrum teams. However, setting a good metric program is not obvious. The book “The Agile Culture” contains interesting thoughts about what could make a metrics program fail.
In this Agile Practitioners meeting, Emily Webber will talk about scaling up using agile and lean techniques, using UK Government Digital Service (GDS) as an example. This presentation looks at how GDS took learnings from managing projects and programmes using agile and lean techniques and translated them to the portfolio framework across an organisation of 300 people: what forums and decisions points they adopted, how they managed and measured workflow as well as how the team did it and what they learnt along the way.
Pair programming is one of the original practice of eXtreme programming, but it is also one of the least used by Agile software development teams. In his blog post, Alisdair McDiarmid explains how Customer.io uses pair programming with remote teams.
The basic rules of Agile project management frameworks like Scrum are deceptively simple. Drawing from his experience as an Agile coach, Jeff Campbell offers in his book “Actionable Agile Tools” some lightweight practices and tools that could help you to implement successfully an Agile approach.
Scrum has long been the most popular of the Agile approaches for software development. But what is Scrum really about? What does a great Scrum team look like? Is Scrum really the flexible, free-spirited collection of ‘frameworks’ that are so often believed to be able to be tailored to suit what works for us? In our attempts to be ‘Agile’, have we forgotten the benefits of structure and discipline? Do we bend Scrum too much to suit us, and what is the impact of this?
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