Never Average Story Points!

When you’re playing Planning Poker with a small software team, it’s pretty easy to reach a consensus. Everyone can be heard, and the team can agree on an acceptable point value for each story. But the larger the team, the harder it is to get everyone on the same page. People stay silent with questions […]

Long-Term Agile Planning Is Possible!

On an agile software project, we readjust plans daily. We pivot to respond to change, discovery, and feedback. Product owners and stakeholders, on the other hand, focus on longer-term planning — defining product roadmaps, release dates, and milestones. As a Delivery Lead, I have the challenge of balancing planning needs for the entire team. Fortunately, […]

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 […]

Five Tasks that Help Keep WIP Down

If you are reading this, you probably already know what WIP is, but just in case you don’t, it stands for work in progress. WIP is a crucial component of Agile development, describing the stories or tasks that are (you guessed it) in progress. A general goal with any Agile project is the keep the […]

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 […]

Agile Misconception #1: Deadlines Don’t Exist

I recently worked with a client who was extremely frustrated with deadlines that seemed to come from nowhere, made no sense to him, and didn’t fit with his idea of Scrum as a methodology. He believed that according to Agile/Scrum, “the business” was not allowed to give deadlines to development teams. Scrum, he believed, allowed […]

A “Grand Unified Theory” of Agile

Okay, that’s a bit grandiose, I admit. But I often see tweets or posts about how people don’t “get” capital-A Agile. Tweets like this and this point out common faults. Everything they say is technically correct but not especially useful. Pointing out all of the not-get-its in the wild won’t make people “get it” better, […]

How We Used a Week of Spikes to Map Out a Feature

For those uninitiated to agile software development, “a spike solution is a very simple program to explore potential solutions” to a particularly challenging problem. This term and definition comes from XP Explained by Kent Beck, and it is still as relevant today as it ever was.

The Atomic Agile Process

The best process is owned by its team, but everyone has to start somewhere. That’s why I drafted this, a template for Atomic Object’s Agile process. It’s designed to be a starting point for our maker teams as they come together to tackle a new project.

Kicking off an Experiment in Agile Family Management

I became aware of the idea of taking the “Agile” approach to software development outside of a technical environment and into the family when I heard a talk Bruce Feiler gave at TEDSalon in New York City in 2013. Feiler identified some of the pain I experience as a parent. I feel like I am constantly on […]

Atomic Spin

Atomic Object’s blog on everything we find fascinating.

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