Agile Buddha - Page 20 - Demystifying Agile, Getting to its Core

Agile Estimation: 9 Reasons Why You Should Use Story Points

A common question about estimating with points is, “Why Points? Why not in Days? Finally I need to do planning so I need to convert points to Days. Why this additional level of indirection?

In-fact I find story points as a good distraction to the team. Let me go over why having this “additional layer of indirection” provided by story points can be very useful.

Agile Estimation : 8 Steps to Successful Story Point Estimation

by Avienaash Shiralige 28 Comments

In Story sizing, team does a comparative analysis between all of the stories for the project. Let’s look at the typical story sizing steps.

For each story to be sized, do the following as a team(Product Owner, Core Scrum team including developers, testers & scrum master).

Is “Faster, Cheaper” Enough? The New Rules of Service Differentiation with Kano Model

by Avienaash Shiralige Leave a Comment

Service companies offerings and messages often says “Faster Time to Market” or “Reduce your Cost of Development“…. Do you think it is a game changer NOW? I would agree if it was couple of years back. But is it still? Applying Kano analysis here could reveal few thoughts.

For those not familiar with the Kano Analysis, there are three types of features or needs. This is more easily depicted in below picture:

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User Stories: Lack of Big Picture Leads to Blind Man Product

by Avienaash Shiralige 5 Comments

One of the Scrum values is “Focus”. It can make or mar a product. It brings direction to the development of a product – from start to finish; and is the back-bone of an effective business strategy.

Having said that, overdo it and the tables are turned. Fret too much over ‘focus’ and what could have been a blessing may become your curse.

Here’s why:

Analyse this picture. Highly focused teams (teams seeing project from sprint to sprint) may well become blind to the big picture perspective.

Scrum Team Dependency on User Experience/Wireframes

by Avienaash Shiralige 7 Comments

Dependency management is a key aspect in Scrum. Dependencies between Scrum team members, between User Stories, between core and extended team, between team and product owner – all have an impact on the efficiency and effectiveness of the team.

I often see Scrum teams having dependencies on User Experience/Web Developers. This is because PO has defined requirements for new sprint, and UI/Web-Developers who are part of development scrum team start working on this now. Wire-frames are yet to be created as per these requirements.