Usually, estimation should be done in 2 levels at the start of each sprint: story level and task level. For best results, product owner and team should do both together, every time, although sometimes it is acceptable for the team estimate at task level without the product owner present. Project Estimation / Roadmap Construction (Story … Read more
With a collocated team, I’d always duplicate user stories on index cards. A wall of cards is much more collaborative and simple to use than any software tool. And what’s most important, it’s in your face. The same is true for a burn chart. In my experience, a software chart gets online looked at by … Read more
Keeping testers busy tends to get easier as a project matures (there is more to test!), but the following points apply in the early stages too: Testers can prepare their test plans, test cases, and automated tests for the user stories before (or while) they are implemented. This helps the team discover any inconsistency or … Read more
“Working software over comprehensive documentation” means you do not need a functional spec… Wrong!!! It just means that you can iron out the wrinkles iteratively with the users – speaking as a vendor, you still need good documentation to assist with the QA and sign-off phases…
Excel is really an extremely powerful tool and is very appropriate for the product backlog (and it has my preference if suitable: just share the product backlog on a network drive and there you go). I have used the following templates successfully in the past: Henrik Kniberg’s Index Card Generator and a wall for the … Read more
I work in government. We recently ran a software development procurement process and selected three vendors to work on an Agile project. Some notes: We were already 75% sure we wanted to run an Agile project because we knew our requirements were ambiguous and because it was a public-facing web project with a significant design … Read more
Unit, integration and functional testing, though exercising the same code, are attacking it from different perspectives. It’s those perspectives that make the difference, if you were to drop one type of testing then something could work its way in from that angle. Also, unit testing isn’t really about testing your code, especially if you are … Read more
Thought I’d make mention of the Redmine Backlogs plugin again. It’s been getting some TLC lately. product backlog view, taskboard view, real-time updates, reports, task colors unique to the user’s preference, etc. http://www.redminebacklogs.net
You might want to think of your story as a vertical slice of the system. A story may (and often will) touch components in all of the architectural layers of the system. You might therefore want to think of your tasks as the work needed to be done on each of the components that your … Read more
The general consensus is that: Product backlog Item is something that can be delivered in a single sprint. Feature is something that can’t be delivered in a single sprint, but that can be delivered in a single release. Epic is something that transcends releases. Theme is a cross cutting concern. Theme is generally implemented as … Read more