Agile Story Card Templates - SolutionsIQ Help Drive Consistency Simplicity – maximizing the amount of work not done – is an essential aspect of achieving organizational agility, and also happens to be one of the twelve Agile Principles behind the Agile Manifesto. A quick way to make your team’s space a little more simple is by having consistent looking Story Cards up on the wall. Why waste time trying to remember the story’s name – always have it in the same place. What do they look like? What’s the best way to use the cards? Here are the primary guidelines: Story NameStory TypeStory SizeAcceptance Criteria (on back)Comments You can also easily track: PriorityKano AnalysisDependenciesTargeted ReleaseIteration CommittedDay Started & Day Finished Why is the back upside down? It may seem a little odd, but we’re Agile Practitioners and do this stuff every day and trust us – it can get annoying to always have to take a card off the wall to read your Acceptance Criteria. Here are a few other ways to use the SolutionsIQ Story Card Template.
Scrum Role Playing Scrum is very explicit in its clarification of roles and responsibilities. Scrum has only three roles; together they cover the responsibilities needed to ensure a successful project. The Product Owner represents the customer and sets the vision, goals and priorities of the project. Almost anyone who has been on a Scrum project has noticed the issues that can arise when one Scrum team member wears two hats (for instance, when one person plays both the role of ScrumMaster and the role of developer or when one person plays Product Owner and developer). Another less-than-ideal scenario is having one person play the roles of ScrumMaster and Product Owner. While none of the problems in the above scenarios is insurmountable, arguably the most anxiety-inducing and uncommon dual-role is the combination of ScrumMaster and Product Owner. The developers were happy for Ben to take on the role (perhaps because none were too keen on being ScrumMaster themselves!)
Overview - Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) Nexus Framework What is Nexus? Nexus is a framework that drives to the heart of scaling: cross-team dependencies and integration issues. It is an exoskeleton that rests on top of multiple Scrum Teams who work together to create an Integrated Increment. The result can be an effective development group of up to 100 people. How Do I Implement Nexus? You will need several techniques to bind the work of the Scrum Teams in your Nexus. We have developed or reformulated over 50 practices to help you launch and sustain a Nexus predictably. Winston W. Royce From a talk Royce gave on August 10, 1990 Winston Walker Royce (August 15, 1929 – June 7, 1995) was an American computer scientist, director at Lockheed Software Technology Center in Austin, Texas. He was a pioneer in the field of software development,[1] known for his 1970 paper from which the Waterfall model for software development was mistakenly[2] drawn.[3] Biography[edit] Born in 1929, Royce entered the California Institute of Technology, where he received his BS in physics, his MS in aeronautical engineering and in 1959 his PhD in aeronautical engineering under Julian David Cole[4] with the thesis Transonic flow over a non-lifting, slender body of revolution. Royce had begun his career as Assistant Professor at the California Institute of Technology. Work[edit] Managing the development of large software systems[edit] The Waterfall model for software development is mistakenly attributed to Royce. The unmodified waterfall model. Software system engineering[edit] According to Richard H.
FBI's Sentinel Project: 5 Lessons Learned Agency used agile development and private sector know-how to finish its long-delayed digital case management system. American Red Cross Social Media Command Center (click image for larger view and for slideshow) After six years of development, the FBI says its next-gen digital case management system, Sentinel, is finally up and running. Sentinel had been a case study in federal IT projects gone awry--missed deadlines, budget overruns, feature shortcomings, and a benchmark test last October that pooped out. Keep in mind that Sentinel has roots in an earlier IT project failure, the so-called Virtual Case File system. Whether the system will work as advertised and be accepted by the agency's rank and file remains to be seen. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Johnson offered the first public demonstration of Sentinel this week at FBI headquarters. Fulgham wasn't around to participate in the unveiling. The Office of Management and Budget demands that federal agencies tap into a more efficient IT delivery model.
Scrum Case Studies | FBI Sentinel Project Executive Summary: Virtual Case File (or VCF) was a software application developed by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI) between 2000 and 2005. The project was not close to completion when it was officially abandoned in January 2005, having turned into a complete fiasco for the FBI. In addition to wasting at least US $100 million, the failure brought widespread criticism to the bureau and its director, Robert S. Mueller III. Key Takeaways: $575 million dollars wasted on the first two attempts at the projectScrum Studio was set up in the basement of the Hoover BuildingStaff reduced from 400 to 40, and in 1 year and $30 million, they were code complete, at a cost savings of more than 90 percent If an organization like the FBI can do this, why can’t yours? Full Case Study:
Manifesto for Agile Software Development Defining MVP, MMF, MMP, and MMR The term minimal viable product (MVP) has achieved buzzword status in recent times and I’m now hearing people throwing around the term MVP almost on a daily basis. Sometimes they’re using it correctly but many times they aren’t. Frankly it’s driving me nuts. The issue is that it’s common for people to say MVP when they are actually talking about a minimal marketable feature (MMF), a minimal marketable product (MMP), or even a minimal marketable release (MMR). First, Some Definitions Figure 1 below overviews how these following terms relate to one another: Minimal Viable Product (MVP). Figure 1. Is it Minimum or Minimal? Given that I’m being picky about terminology, I realized that there isn’t agreement as to whether we should use the term MINIMUM viable product or MINIMAL viable product (and similarly for MMR, MMP and MMF). Minimum. As you can see, very nuanced. Example: Developing a New Product Now let’s work through an example of the development of a fictional product. Figure 2.
8 Tips for Creating A Compelling Product Vision | Roman Pichler Creating and managing a successful product requires a lot of time and energy. In order to be fully committed, you have to be convinced that what you are doing is right and have a clear vision of where to take your product. This post shares eight tips to help you create an effective product vision that inspires the development team and the stakeholders. 8 Tips for Creating A Compelling Product Vision Describe the Motivation behind the Product Having an idea for a new product is great. To choose the right vision, ask yourself why you are excited to work on the product, why you care about it, what positive change the product should bring about, and how it will shape the future. If you choose the company vision for you product, then that’s fine. Look beyond the Product Be clear on the difference between the product vision and the product and don’t confuse the two. An effective product vision goes beyond the product and captures the change the product should instigate. Employ a Shared Vision
Project Success Sliders: Agile Project ROI Project Success Sliders are a way for key project stakeholders or a product owner to convey their expectations to the team. By default there are six sliders, each of which reflects some dimension by which agile project success can be determined—for example, delivery of all planned features, quality, meeting an agreed upon schedule. Each project success slider starts at a value of three along a continuum from one to five. The product owner or key stakeholders then moves sliders up or down to reflect the appropriate mix of factors in determining the success of the project. Stakeholders are prevented from simply moving all sliders to five by a rule that states that every movement up must be offset by a corresponding move down. You can edit the text for each project success slider as well as add or remove sliders using the buttons in the tool. Project success sliders were first described in the book Radical Project Management by Rob Thomsett.
Our Journey - Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership Robert K. Greenleaf founded the nonprofit Greenleaf Center (first called “The Center for Applied Ethics”) in 1964. Not long after, Greenleaf published The Servant as Leader, a landmark essay that coined the phrase “servant-leader” and launched the modern servant leadership movement. Since its founding, the Greenleaf Center has been a thought-leader in the field of servant leadership and a good steward of Robert Greenleaf’s writings after his death. The Greenleaf Center built an extensive catalog of publications over the years and continues to add new ones each year. Our online bookstore offers these publications and other materials covering the subject of servant leadership. For 22 years, the Greenleaf Center has hosted an international conference that connects, educates and inspires servant-leaders from around the world.
A product manager's guide to release planning - Work Life by Atlassian Growing up, my ski coach always used to say “If you don’t plan for it, it won’t happen.” He wanted us to set goals and lay out a path to reach them. The same sentiment can be applied to building software, except building software is much more of a team sport than skiing. If your team is geographically distributed, planning and communicating not only becomes more of a challenge, but also more critical to the success of your project. I’ll show you how teams at Atlassian plan feature releases using a page on our internal wiki that organizes all the relevant information in a central place that is accessible to the team and anyone else who needs to know what’s going on. Planning and communicating this way solves a slew of problems all in one go: Developers don’t waste time searching for information. We start with a high-level overview page that serves as a sort of home base, then drill down into specifics on sub pages. Step 1: collect ideas (the “why”) Define the team. Lots goin’ on there. Team