Scrum Sprint Planning Meeting Posted by admin under Scrum Basics Sprint Planning Meeting In Scrum, every iteration begins with the sprint planning meeting. At this meeting, the Product Owner and the team negotiate which stories a team will tackle that sprint. Time-boxed to four hours, this meeting is a conversation between the Product Owner and the team. That is, it’s up to the Product Owner to decide which stories are of the highest priority to the release and which will generate the highest business value, but the team has the power to push back and voice concerns or impediments. When the team agrees to tackle the work, the Product Owner adds the corresponding stories into the sprint backlog. At this point, the Product Owner is typically asked to leave while the team decomposes the sprint backlog items into tasks. Now that sprint goals are defined, the team is ready to get to work. Watch an example Sprint Planning Meeting. The Daily Standup What have I done since the last Scrum meeting (yesterday)?
Lean UX Process and Principles Continuing our interview series with some of the leading voices in Lean, today we’re speaking with Jeff Gothelf, the author of Lean UX. Applying Lean to user experience is exciting and, in my opinion, is an area of Lean that is sorely lacking attention. Most Lean practitioners focus on operations, but there’s not as much attention paid to the user experience. In today’s interview, you’ll learn the following: What a Lean UX person has in common with a Lean guy on the manufacturing floor.What Respect for People looks like in the context of Lean UX.What are the 7 Wastes of Lean UX Enjoy the interview with Jeff Gothelf and hope you will benefit from learning about Lean UX Process and Principles. Hello Jeff, and thanks for taking the time to speak with me. I am an interaction designer who, over the last 16 years, has worked on a variety of products, apps and services. You’re a recognized expert in Lean UX. One of the pillars of the Toyota Production System is Respect for People. Interesting.
Common Mistakes when Applying Scrum | How to Create Products that Customers Hate 5 Flares Filament.io 5 Flares × The following list is a tongue-in-cheek collection of common mistakes in applying Scrum. They all influence product success negatively. Combined they are a recipe for certain failure. Apply the product owner role pragmatically: Spilt the role across several people or work with a product owner committee.Shoot for the maximum marketable product – a product that pleases everyone and has a myriad of features.Have a can-do attitude, say yes to every requirement, and put it into the product backlog. To avoid the mistakes above and to learn how to create great products with Scrum, refer to my book Agile Product Management with Scrum, or book yourself on one of my product owner trainings.
How to design your Business Model as a Lean Startup | Methodologist If you spend time exploring innovation methodologies and models, you know that configuration of such frameworks largely apply new ideas, assembly and build upon previous work (hat off to science). I have come to explore conformity of two emerging frameworks; the Business Model Ontology by Alex Osterwalder and the Lean Startup methodology by Eric Ries. The result, the Lean Startup and Business Model Canvas mashup is illustrated below. With the Business Model Ontology Osterwalder proposes a single reference model based on the similarities of a wide range of business model configurations. On methodology, Eric Ries coins the Lean Startup, a practical approach for creating and managing startups using principles of Steven Blank‘s Customer Development methodology alongside Agile Development methodologies. The Lean Startup Business Model Pattern adopts principles of the Lean Startup (i.e. agile development and customer development) with the building blocks of the Business Model Canvas.
Scrum Effort Estimation and Story Points Posted by admin under Scrum Basics In waterfall, managers determine a team member’s workload capacity in terms of time. That is, managers estimate how long they anticipate certain tasks will take and then assign work based on that team member’s total available time. This is problematic because it does not distinguish between a story that is very hard to complete and one that is undemanding; it only considers how long the work will take. Scrum takes a considerably different approach to determining a team member’s capacity. What does the process of estimation look like? In the Sprint Planning Meeting, the team sits down to estimate its effort for the stories in the backlog. Still, even when teams possess a shared understanding of their scale, they can’t help but estimate differently. Need an example? To see how velocity is computed from story points, watch an example Sprint Review Meeting including velocity measurement. Be Sociable, Share!
96Levels/LEAN-UX How Companies Track People Without Becoming Big Brother Andre Lavoie is the CEO of ClearCompany, the first talent alignment platform that bridges the gap between talent management and business strategy by contextualizing employees’ work around a company’s vision and goals. Privacy is a huge buzzword in today’s digitally-connected world. Companies are trying to strike a balance between transparent organizational structures that encourage collaboration and innovation, and respecting the privacy and boundaries of workers. What happens is usually far from organizational transparency and closer to micromanagement. According to the book “What To Do When There’s Too Much To Do” by Laura Stack, some 75 to 80 percent of the American workforce has suffered at the hands of micromanagement. In fact, a study by Dale Carnegie showed 42 percent of the most engaged workers felt their talents were being utilized and recognized, not micromanaged. So, how do you maintain a transparent organization without becoming Big Brother? See progress without micromanaging
UX for Lean Startups, a Great Resource for Founders and New Designers You don’t need a Masters degree from Carnegie Mellon to practice user experience. Every day thousands of people practice user experience in their jobs, and they do so without knowing it. And they might be doing it poorly, if they don’t understand the methods and practices that are used by designers to produce great products. Researching the market, iteration, or other methods are unknown to them, and there aren’t a lot of publications that service this market of unknowing UX designers. That’s where Laura Klein’s book UX For Lean Startups comes in. Aimed at the same market and a great companion to Eric Reis’ Lean Startup, the publication is a very concise overview of what user experience is and how you can apply it in just about any startup environment. It purposely omits case studies because Laura feels that every situation is unique. It doesn’t use big words Laura calls it what it is: “You know, listening to your users.” Testing ideas quicker and cheaper Engineers are expensive. That’s.
Effort vs. Time Effort vs. Time Posted on 16, Nov 2011 When defining a story, one can fill out an ‘effort’ and a ‘duration’. Effort = size = Story points Let starts with the story point. When you want to develop some feature, you have to know the „size“ at first. When we are talking about story points, we are talking about the size. This size is evaluated in different units. The best approach to start with relative estimation is to try some example on real life objects. Put all the stories (objects) in front of developers.Let them to choose one story (object) that will get the number Effort=1. For example, Story 2 – „I as a user want to calculate average values per years for every customer“ is harder story than Story 1 mention above. You will do this for every story that is in your product backlog. Product is typically estimated in 2-3 full days during the planning meeting. Size of stories is estimated in the Fibonacci scale. Planning Poker® During the planning meetings we “play” Planning Poker®. Resources
3 Challenges Implementing Lean UX in the Enterprise Transitioning teams to be more “lean” in their product development is not easy. This is especially true in larger, more established organizations. Years of historical momentum coupled with siloed bureaucracy and overzealous legal departments have entrenched a serial, lengthy process in many banks, insurance companies and other enterprise level orgs. Making a list of all of these challenges can be a lengthy endeavor. Failure is not an option For Lean UX and Lean Startup to take hold philosophically, your company culture must allow for some level of failure. If you’re facing this challenge here’s what you can do: 1. 2. Your company manages to outputs, not outcomes Many companies build lists of features and then task teams with building those lists. Lean thinking pushes us to seek the business outcome we seek to create with our feature sets and then question whether these features will get us there. Silos Lean UX thrives on cross-functional collaboration. Share your feedback in the comments.
UI Development Guidelines | Asurion Online Standards Resource Note: These Design and Layout Standards are not intended to serve as online styleguides. Rather, they are things that a designer needs to keep in mind in order to minimize the impact of design decisions on the page’s performance. The desktop break-point of a webpage design should be optimized for a resolution of 1024 X 768, figuring for a left and right margin, which translates to 960px for content +/- 20px. For a responsive design, there may not be a maximum limitation on width, but the entire width of the page should be visible within 1024 pixels. NOTE: If the content width is equal to the full width, or 1024px, instead of accounting for margin and right scrollbar, the page will have horizontal scrolling.Provide colors in a hexadecimal format. PHP should use the PSR-2 guidelines. Some important things to note regarding PSR-2: Proper tab spacing is four (4) spaces — configure your editor’s RC or settings appropriatelyPHP files should end in a single blank line and the closing ?
About Usability - Website Design A website is a window into how your organization is run. Users assume that if you cut corners on your website, you also cut corners with your products and services. When users feel smart and sophisticated on your website, they tend to stick around. When users feel stupid, their blood pressure goes up, their heart rate increases, and they get a little hot under the collar. This visceral negative reaction begins to harm trust and brand perception almost immediately. Print Design vs. Everyone knows how to turn pages in a brochure. While there is a surface similarity between print graphic design and website graphic design, website design is much closer to product or industrial design than print design. There are many popular websites that are just plain ugly, but highly functional. For these reasons, usability should not be an afterthought in website design. The benefits of planning usability into your project from the start are: A Model of Pervasive Usability in Website Design ↑ Back to top
BRD vs. Functional Software Requirements We often get the question asking “what is the difference between business requirements and functional requirements?” In prior posts I have discussed that these distinctions are actually artificial and are artifacts of an organization structure that requires people in “the business” to produce a “business requirements document (BRD)” vs. some other group that will produce a “system requirements specification (SRS)”. The difference ultimately is just the level of detail. But given that we do have to live with BRD’s and SRS’s, how do we decide what goes into each document? As you may know, at Seilevel we use a model called the Requirements Object Model (ROM) which describes a hierarchy of business needs and features. To determine what goes into the BRD and what goes into an SRS, the best place to start is by thinking in terms of who uses the BRD vs. the SRS and what decisions do they need to make from it. Build – The team begins building.
User Stories and User Story Examples by Mike Cohn User stories are short, simple descriptions of a feature told from the perspective of the person who desires the new capability, usually a user or customer of the system. They typically follow a simple template: As a <type of user>, I want <some goal> so that <some reason>. User stories are often written on index cards or sticky notes, stored in a shoe box, and arranged on walls or tables to facilitate planning and discussion. As such, they strongly shift the focus from writing about features to discussing them. In fact, these discussions are more important than whatever text is written. Next: Can You Show Some User Story Examples? One of the benefits of agile user stories is that they can be written at varying levels of detail. As a user, I can backup my entire hard drive. Because an epic is generally too large for an agile team to complete in one iteration, it is split into multiple smaller user stories before it is worked on. Next: How is Detail Added to User Stories?