The User Story Pipeline: A Visual To Guide the Agile Process

Every Agile project needs user stories. But where do stories come from? I’m not asking who types the description into your backlog, I’m really asking how a team works together to create the definition of features that developers should complete.

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.

Scrum Misconception #3 – You Have to Know Every Detail to Size a Story

Estimating work is helpful for managing teams and planning for the future. But working through every nuance to provide an estimate can cause frustration and be time-consuming.

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 […]

Surf With Your Knees Bent – Four Ways to Expect the Unexpected

Software makers, like surfers, need to be ready for unexpected problems. We need to “surf with our knees bent,” using a stance that takes the unexpected into account. Here are four ways you should adjust your stance to avoid being thrown into the water… metaphorically.

Three Ways to “Own It” on a Large, Distributed Team

When I came to Atomic nearly five years ago, I joined the largest development team I had ever known. We had four developers from Atomic and two from the client working directly with us, as well as the client’s QA staff, an operations engineer assigned to our team, and the client’s software architect checking in.

Intro to Incident Communication for Product Managers

One sure test of any product manager’s resiliency is how she manages unplanned service outages and other types of incidents. I’m referring to events that can risk a company’s reputation, increase costs, and erode client confidence.

Agile Misconception #2: We Don’t Need Documentation

Documentation means a lot of different things to different people. I’ve also found it’s one of the top five topics to cause a developer to cringe. If you’ve used a waterfall software development process, you’re all too familiar with documentation. From requirements to systems architecture to design, you’re creating documentation at every step of the […]

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Project & Team Management