Three Levels of Software Project Closeout Documentation

I find that authoring documentation is best done at the end of a project. Writing it too early means it needs to be re-written as things change. Unfortunately, life happens. On many projects, almost no time is available for documentation at the project’s end. This may seem irresponsible, but it’s the tradeoff teams and clients […]

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.

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 […]

Atomic Spin

Atomic Object’s blog on everything we find fascinating.

By: Matt Fletcher

Author: Matt Fletcher