Welcome to day 3 of the 10-day playbook series for Product Owners in Sprint 0. Please read days 1 and 2 if you haven’t already (which focus on business problems, objectives, stakeholder identification and personas). Today, we will start drafting high-level future state models and eliciting the epics and features …
agile
The 2016 Tool Study: A Contributor’s Thoughts on Suggested Usage
Seilevel just released its requirements management tool study results for 2016, refreshed five years after the last one. Between everyone on the team, hundreds of hours went into this project. I was one of the major contributors to the 2016 study, which allowed me to participate in all phases of …
PMI-Agile Certified Practitioner Exam, Part 1: Applying and Preparing for the exam
This past year I decided to try something new — I decided to get a certification. I looked at many of the certifications on the market, for both Business Analysis and Agile Practices. In the end, I decided to go with the Agile Certified Practitioner, both because I’ve been working …
Why we should all stop creating requirements documents: Part 2
By James Hulgan
A lot has changed since I published my last post on this matter. I took some family leave for the birth of my son, wrapped up a really exciting project helping a bank launch a credit card, and began a new chapter in my career at Seilevel. Additionally, Seilevel recently …
Managers (and Business Stakeholders) in Agile- Where do I fit? Part 1 of 3
So, your company is going “agile,” and you’ve heard that in agile they don’t need managers (at least there is no scrum role for a manager). Additionally, all the teams say they’re supposed to be “self-directing” now, whatever that means! What’s a good manager to do? Or are you a …
Ratio of Developers to Analysts in Agile
By Ajay Badri
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 …
The growing importance of software in Formula 1
We are all very well aware that software has taken up an increasingly important role in all of our daily lives, but every now and then I encounter a new area where software is playing an ever-greater role. The latest interest being Formula 1 (F1) racing. Formula 1 is, by …
User Stories and Technical Stories in Agile Development
By Ajay Badri
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 …
IT Readiness for Agile
I’ve worked with a number of organizations lately who are either in the process of moving to an agile framework, or are thinking about doing so. These organizations face similar problems that they are attempting to solve, including late projects, large demand with limited capacity, lack of transparency to the …
Happy people, happy code
I have a friend who, after years being that one guy who was fluent in Cobol and kept that ancient but really important legacy application running, got a new gig at a local Agile tech company. The last time we got together, I asked him how he liked the new …
