I've been working on an infrastructure-heavy project of late, and one of the problems our team faced was differing viewpoints on what "done" actually means. In short, we ended up with a lot of variations of the following conversation: "It's done, I finished it." "But... I still see an error »
One of the problems we regularly face with our more technical stories (for example, setting up a monitoring stack) is explaining to the people in charge of the budget why they should pay for this. It's a valid question. I think it arises because when we're writing technical stories, we »
In a Scrum context, multitasking is bad. Teams who follow Kanban will be familiar with this concept, as that process invites you to explicitly set your lane limits up front - only 3 things in progress, only 2 things awaiting product owner review, only 7 tickets waiting for release, and »
I had one of those "changing the way we work" discussions today, about the product backlog. I'll spare you the details, but it came down to answering two questions: How many of the stories we know about should we have on the product backlog? How many of the stories do »
I've got a confession to make: I secretly enjoy rewriting code when requirements change. I get to think again about what I was doing and my assumptions, tidy up the lingering technical debt, make a few performance optimisations and abstract things a little bit so I don't have to worry »
Firefighting is one of the biggest and most common causes of lost productivity and morale in software development. It usually manifests as developers being pulled off their project to urgently fix something - the live site is spewing 500 errors, there's a button in the wrong place, or a senior »