Include the Why in Your Story Title
Poor story titles describe the What of a feature or task. Better story titles also describe the motivation behind the feature or task — the Why.
Author: Matt Fletcher
Adding Blockers to Your Backlog? Always Include a Specific Next Step
A pet peeve of mine is when progress on a story is blocked with a reason like: “Need code sample to add live chat feature.” Or: “Don’t have VPN access.” What needs to happen next? Does someone know they need to help unblock this? I’m sure I’m not the only one who would be wondering […]
Four DOs and DON’Ts for Software Systems Integrations
Systems integrations can be wonderful when they work, but they often end in failure. Here are four tips to improve your success rate.
Code Reviews Are a Mistake – Try Pair Programming
Recent projects have made it crystal-clear to me that formal code reviews create waste and provide no value in return. By relying on pair programming, my project teams are delivering more effectively and efficiently than before.
What Do Clients Need from Consultants? Options and a Recommendation
Consulting is an abstract term and open to interpretation. My interpretation is that, at its core, consulting is about listening, identifying options, identifying tradeoffs, and making a recommendation.
Writing Agile Stories, Part 4 – Decision-Making Guidelines
Deciding what (and how much) behavior you want is the hardest part of the entire story creation process. The reason for this is straightforward—if it were an obvious decision, you wouldn’t even have to consciously think about it. Your brain would make the decision for you unconsciously, and the story definition would simply flow out […]
Writing Agile Stories, Part 3 – Setting Good Story Goals
Creating a good user story in the backlog is challenging. As I described last week, the first step is writing stories that are small, meaningful, and focused on inputs/outputs. But that’s not enough. Even if you have experience writing Agile stories, have you been clearly articulating the goal of the story? Do you provide the […]
Writing Agile Stories, Part 2 – Making Stories Small & Meaningful
If you read my last post, you’ve managed to slice-and-dice your feature set into a set of skeleton stories for your backlog. Now it’s time to write each individual story. How do you do that? I have two guidelines.
Writing Agile Stories, Part 1 – Breaking a UI into a Set of Features/Stories
It’s time to begin the development phase of a project. The needs have been identified, and the workflow design is complete. Now it’s time to create the initial set of stories for your backlog. Where do you start? How do you write individual stories? How do you even decide what those stories should be? I’ll […]
There’s No Such Thing as a “Massive MVP.” Build Releases Instead!
The idea of a “massive MVP” is an oxymoron. How can a Minimum Viable Product end up taking a team of up to ten people a year and over a million dollars to build? And yet, I’ve seen a number of organizations—usually enterprise companies—building massive MVPs. Clearly, there’s confusion between how the term MVP is […]