See Your Agile Measurement Traps In honor of my new book, Create Your Successful Agile Project: Collaborate, Measure, Estimate, Deliver, this is the second in a series of four trap emails, the measurement trap. Here are three common measurement traps: You/your management thinks velocity is a target or a measure of progress. Someone (often a […]
See Your Agile Collaboration Traps In honor of the impending Create Your Successful Agile Project book release, I decided to send you a four-part series about agile traps. Yes, one for each piece of the subtitle. This one is the collaboration trap. Here are three common collaboration traps: Your team is a component team. (The
Program sponsors and the teams themselves want to know where they are in the program. What’s started? What’s not? How much more remains? It’s tempting to measure “everything.” That creates another problem: You might spend too much time attempting to gather data that doesn’t provide enough information. You might even miss seeing the real progress
Sourcing, how and where you recruit possible candidates is a great way to use small, safe-to-fail experiments. That’s because the recruiting landscape continues to change. A little history: in the past, we read newspapers—on paper! Before the Civil Rights Act, employers advertised for “Men Wanted” and “Women Wanted.” (I don’t remember if that was women
One of the problems with agile hiring is this: what data do you collect? Let me digress for a bit and talk about cycle time and lead time. This image explains cycle time and lead time for a cross-functional team. Everything starts in the Ready column and proceeds through the possible progression through development and
In many of my transitioning to agile clients, the managers want to know when the project will be done. Or, they want to know how much the project will cost. (I have a new book about this, Predicting the Unpredictable: Pragmatic Approaches to Estimating Cost or Schedule.) Managers ask for estimates because they want to
Workshop: Create Your Successful Agile (& Lean) Project Workshop Workshop Objective: Learn how to deliver value as a collaborative team. You’ll use agile and lean principles, and experiment with various practices to help you find your agile approach. Workshop Overview: As you practice with your project, you’ll learn how to create your collaborative team. Then,
I read Metrics with Impact by Michiel van Genuchten and Les Hatton in the July/August IEEE Software, pp 99-101 last week. They discuss a metric: Compound Annual Growth, CAGR for software. CAGR is interesting to me, because I’ve actually measured it before. Here are some graphs (no numeric data) to describe what happens in different
“Hey, Dan, it’s time for us to move to agile,” explained Tristan, a project manager. “Tristan, you’ve been singing that tune for a while,” replied Dan, a member of the PMO. “Well, now I have data that I think you can use with the rest of the PMO and with our senior managers. Look at
INTRO: We all have different attitudes and policies toward finding and fixing defects. The choice about whether and when to fix defects depends upon many factors, one of the least understood being the actual cost of fixing a defect. In this week’s column, testing expert Johanna Rothman shares a formula for calculating the system test