State of Agile

Introduction

Seems like there's lots going on in the agile world right now. Lots of talk about Lean and it's impact on Agile. Lots of attacks going on at the CSM certification. Kanban is all over the news these days. And just last week, I read about a new Agile methodology called Stride.

So how do we make sense of this all?

My opinion is that there is value in each of the methodologies (for the purposes of this blog I'll refer to them all as methodologies even though some of you might not think of them as such). It's real important to read about them all so that you are armed with enough knowledge to know what's out there. I see this as a toolset from which you can choose for your specific situation.

Stories - how small is too small

Today over on the Scrum Development forum a question was posted by a member. They have a situation where they have mixed some small stories with some larger ones. And the larger one is LATE - Really late. It's now been pushed into the 3rd Sprint and according to her it's still tight. So now they're faced with a situation where the smaller stories that are done can't be deployed as they never branched the code.

I find it alarming that folks can't break user stories down further. So many folks say you can't do it when over on the XP forums they're all working with really small stories so much so that they don't even bother with tasks any more.

The 7 Software Development Wastes - Lean series Part 7 - Defects

Introduction

When one looks at all the wastes, defects has to be the most obvious one. The cost and repercussions of finding defects varies depending on where in the cycle they're found. Defects found early on in the development life-cycle are way less costly to resolve than defects found later on in the cycle; the most expensive being when applications are already in-production.

Additionally, depending on when the defects are found, defects can and do trigger other wastes like task switching, relearning etc.

Defects can be very costly for an organization. So the trick with defects is that you need to 1) Prevent them from happening in the first place and 2) Find and fix them as early in the development life-cycle as possible.

So what can you do to prevent them from happening in the first place?