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Developing complex software for enterprises using Agile development methodologies has presented some unique challenges, especially in the area of regression testing. This is particularly true in the Financial Services sector where extremely thorough and extensive regression is required and, in many cases, dictated by Compliance and Regulatory needs. For legacy …
Conventional wisdom generally holds that the ratio of developers to analysts in an Agile framework is about 4:1 or 3:1. In essence, it says that 1 analyst can support the work of 3 or 4 full time developers working on a project. For Waterfall projects, this ratio is higher and …
A common problem that I have seen Agile teams grapple with is writing user stories and acceptance criteria for projects that are heavy on technical implementation and modifications with no substantive change in the user interfaces or workflows. This kind of scenario is very common in companies that are upgrading …
The last couple of years has seen a wholesale shift in development methodologies among the Fortune 1000 companies from Waterfall to Agile. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Agile revolution that has been brewing in small companies, startups and web companies for the last decade and a …
Companies that make the switch from Waterfall methodologies to Agile struggle with requirements documentation. How much documentation do we need? What kind? When should this documentation be created? Who is creating this documentation? Our experience shows that companies have swung the pendulum too far in terms of both the quantity …
At Seilevel, on our Agile projects we have introduced a project artifact called the Agile Requirements Document or ARD that we create during the planning phase of a project. We have done this on several projects and have had good success with it. An ARD is conceptually similar in some …
Managing a Product Backlog when there is only one development team in an organization creating one solution at a time is relatively straight forward. However, large enterprises have multiple development teams creating a multitude of solutions with interdependencies between them. Managing product backlogs in these situations becomes very tricky, especially …
Agile is often spoken of a development methodology along the lines of “Agile is a development methodology; other common development methodologies are Waterfall, Iterative, etc.” This is akin to saying something like “Weightlifting is a means of keeping fit; other common techniques to stay fit are aerobics, swimming, running, walking, …
I recently participated in a Panel Discussion on the state of the Business Analyst Profession held by IIBA of Austin. One of the questions we tackled was the following: “What are the key traits that a Business Analyst must possess?” There are many qualifications and abilities that a good analyst …
Much is made of and written about the “hard skills” that a Product Manager must possess. She should be analytical, critical, methodical, detail oriented and master of a vast array of models, methodologies and techniques. But I find very little emphasis in the popular writings or training in our field …
