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.
Project & Team Management
Consulting Under Pressure
Every developer has had late nights of debugging seemingly impossible problems. And every consultant has been through crucial conversations explaining their reasoning for tough decisions. Those of us who are software developers and consultants get all the highs and lows of both. High-pressure consulting situations can be tricky to navigate in the heat of the […]
Bringing the Customer Along Is Worth It
As a Delivery Lead at Atomic, I sit between the client and the product team and one of my responsibilities is to enhance the client’s experience. What does that really mean? It varies depending on the makeup of the client team and the objectives for their project. However, a common element of any client enhancement […]
Handling a Coworker’s Departure the Atomic Way
At Atomic Object, our culture is defined by a handful of company values. These values drive our collective success by creating close-knit, on-site teams. When a coworker recently announced they were moving back to their home state, I was surprised at how applicable these values were to the way we handled the change. Act Transparently […]
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 […]
My Five New Backlog Management Habits for 2020
It’s 2020! In theory, you should be staying on top of your backlog all year long, but we all know how that goes… So, like working out, eating better, and getting into better habits, the new year marker can give us a chance to refresh and improve our product backlog management. Here are five ways […]
Dissent Is Inevitable. How Can we Make it Constructive?
Disagreement from within the ranks can be a great resource for a leader. A functional organization allows people to voice disagreement, debate the issues, and then commit. Disagreement lets you know that the people you lead trust you enough to be honest with you about how they’re feeling. When engaged in properly, disagreement can offer […]
Why Agile Adoption Fails (+ 8 Ways to Find Success)
Agile adoption failure stories are abundant, especially in large organizations. There are many vague reasons and lame excuses for this: "Our culture doesn’t support change initiatives." "Our leadership won’t adopt an agile mindset.” "Our change order process can’t integrate with an agile process." And so on. Here are some concrete things you can do or […]
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.
How I’m Improving Predictability with Pivotal Tracker’s ‘Team Strength’
I was reluctant to embrace Pivotal Tracker when I joined Atomic because I valued Jira so highly. But over the last year, I’ve come to rely on a handy feature that I didn’t have with Jira — Team Strength. Why? It allows me to adjust overall velocity by configuring variations in my team’s schedule from […]