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Showing posts from 2016

Super Stories .... Features to the rescue!

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Many moons ago i wrote a post about the use of epics. How to visualise them and use them as a starting point for large project decomposition ( read it here ). The world has moved on a bit since then but still I see people I work with struggling with some of the same issues. How to break big projects down into small, valuable, usable chunks that can be delivered quickly by development teams. In my previous post you can see how the epic user story is a stepping stone to reaching smaller, valuable user stories. These days I seem to be discussing Features a lot more with people. Epics v Features To begin with I find there is confusion around Epics v Features. Note: The Epic I refer to here is the original Epic user story, before SAFe decided an Epic was a different thing altogether What are they & Whats the difference?  How are they different to user stories? What size are they? Let start with addressing these questions What are they & what's the difference?

Agile is a team game

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Agile software development is a team sport. I see so many issues when working with software teams that I have also come across in a sports team context.  Teams are collections of people and to get a collection of individuals motivated and organised to achieve a common goal is not easy. I am convinced there is much we can learn from  the sporting arena to help us perform better as software teams. One example is the concept of  Individual efficiency vs group efficiency. Individual v team efficiency A lot of what is important for the success of sports teams is also valuable for software teams. We create teams with a view to the Team achieving more together than the individuals would on their own or because the task/ deadline before us is unachievable without extra man power.  Example : Amazing footballers like Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Diego Maradona could not  achieve anything on their own, they need to operate within a team structure to achieve any great success