Musings of a Software Development Manager

Keeping you backlog in order doesn’t tend to happen in isolation. My past experience is the backlog drifts because of a concentration on completing day to day Sprint tasks. You can tell when the backlog has drifted, the planning meeting goes long. Kane Mar suggests an approach of using a Story Time [...]

Agile is really designed around software projects. Infrastructure is a different animal. With an infrastructure project some things start to break down:

You usually aren’t writing much code, maybe some database install scripts so no unit tests.
Often there’s no continuous integration to speak of.
Configuration tasks on new software are often difficult to estimate.
Many tasks [...]

I hadn’t realized the Head First series now has a book on software development. Curious, I took a glance at the table of contents. Topics include:

TDD
User Stories
Burn Down Charts
Continuous Integration
Test Coverage

Agile and XP practices are starting to be assumed. Maybe Ambler and others are right that Agile has really crossed the chasm. [...]

The lights went out to work today after a winter storm rolled through Sacramento. In an agile spirit we still held one of our standups after moving near one of the windows.
Scrum Master: “OK, anyone have anything to report?”
Team Member #1: “I was really productive right up until the lights went out.”
Team [...]

A sign of team self-management success is when the Scrum Master is out or busy and someone just fills in. I’ve known one of our Scrum projects was moving along pretty well, but our organization still has a tendency to try to have another PM fill in at the daily standup. In the [...]

I’m off to my first open space conference later this month at Open Agile California. Should be a great chance to recharge some batteries and talk about issues with sustaining agile. I know after three years of Agile and two years of our official effort that we no longer do a lot of [...]

When you do Agile development you really need good people otherwise things won’t work. And my answer is have you ever seen a waterfall project delivering good software by putting baboons on it and giving them bananas.
This average thing is completely wrong. To produce software you anyway need good developers no matter what. [...]

Every QA person uses a bug tracker. I had thought all our teams used bug trackers religiously. Turns out some of our QA people have adopted the idea that they should just walk over and talk to the developers and show them when they find a bug. Often those bugs get fixed [...]

In number the great bulk of projects I see are small maintenance or minor enhancement projects. They’re done in a day or a week or two by a single developer. Adding anyone or even the overhead of something like Scrum is counter-productive.
My assumption has been you hand off the assignment and let the [...]

Developers have no love of estimates. They’ve been pinned in a corner by an estimate and beaten to a pulp. “But you said it would be done by Friday!”
I don’t have any problem with a developer being reluctant to give an estimate. I do have a problem with developers refusing to give [...]