Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
I listened to The Ultimate Metric: Identifying the Right Problems to Solve. The guest, Janelle Klein, said: Technical debt is not a loan I thought that was brilliant. She went on to explain that when we talk about “debt” managers think they have dials to manage the debt. Uh oh. Wrong. When managers think in …
If you read my Three Alternatives to Making Smaller Stories, you noticed one thing. In each of these examples, the problem was in the teams’ ability to show progress and create interim steps. But, what about when you have a “wicked” problem, when you don’t know if you can create the answer? If you are …
Continue reading “Make Stories Small When You Have "Wicked" Problems”
When I was in Israel a couple of weeks ago teaching workshops, one of the big problems people had was large stories. Why was this a problem? If your stories are large, you can’t show progress, and more importantly, you can’t change. For me, the point of agile is the transparency—hey, look at what we’ve …
Continue reading “Three Alternatives for Making Smaller Stories”
If you saw Large Program? Release More Often, you might have noted that I said, You want to release all the time inside your building. You need the feedback, to watch the product grow. Some of my clients have said, “But my customers don’t want the software that often.” That might be true. You may …
Continue reading “Small Internal Releases Lead to Happy Customers”
I write a twice-yearly column for Better Software magazine. The title of the column is called “Technically Speaking.” For this column, I decide to tackle the question of “What’s a Professional?” If you don’t already subscribe to the magazine, you do have to join the site. It’s a free registration to join.
We got here because I started with Managing the Stream of Features in an Agile Program. That got me to Organizing an Agile Program, Part 1:Introduction, Organizing an Agile Program, Part 2: Networks for Managing Agile Programs, Organizing an Agile Program Part 3: Large Programs Demand Servant Leadership. Sorry I got behind. Life interfered. Some …
Continue reading “Organizing An Agile Program, Part 4: Start From the Teams and Work Up”
Many months ago, Rebecca asked an interesting question about technical debt in projects. She asked, How to start when there’s a really big mess? In that case, small, just being a professional clean-up acts may not even make a dent. Of course, as with any good question, the answer is, “it depends.” And the biggest …
Continue reading “Transition to Agile, Large Technical Debt, Small Project”
Do you have a product owner who doesn’t want to admit to technical debt? “Give me another feature! And another feature! Just keep giving me features! It’s feature time, baby!” Once a product owner has the heady feeling of seeing features one after the other, it’s difficult for that product owner to consider anything other …
Continue reading “Managing Technical Debt in an Agile Project”
We understand how to swarm around a feature as a collocated team. But how do you do that when you are part of a geographically distributed agile team? It depends on how you are distributed and across how many time zones. How are you distributed? Too many geographically distributed teams are separated by function. That …
Once you have a program (a collection of interrelated projects focused on one business goal) and you have technical debt, you have a much bigger problem. Not just because the technical debt is likely bigger. Not just because you have more people. But because you also geographically distributed teams, and those teams are almost always …