Most of the software applications use interfacing points, e.g. a database, XML datasource, or a restful service. Such interfacing points pose challenges while creating repeatable automated tests. The challenges are as follows: Tests Become Flaky Tests become flaky as they depend on the connection itself. If a database or a restful service is down, the tests dependent on them fail. Tests that sometimes work and sometimes do not, break the trust of a team. Sometimes just because of that people stop paying attention to the test suite and may not fix them. After some time such tests become unmain ..read more

Story points are used to arrive at a shared understanding around a PBI. This works well when a team works collaboratively. Such teams take a PBI and swarm together to complete it. For instance, a front-end developer does her job, along with a designer and a back-end developer. In other similar scenarios, a team can have a mix of specialists and full-stack developers. These folks pair up and keep switching from one story to another as part of pair switching.  In all these scenarios, having a shared understanding on a PBI helps. That’s the reason why planning poker and in turn story points ..read more

Product development continues to remain the primary focus of Agile software development methods. While we focus on product development and in turn on product development companies, a big segment of software development eco-system, IT service companies, isn’t talked about that much. People working in IT service companies can vouch for the struggle they deal with on daily basis. But their stories don’t get enough attention. When it comes to software implementations, IT services companies work for a client organisation and that client organisation may have its own set of processes which may or m ..read more

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When it comes to Agile estimation, apart from story point estimation, people have been using various other approaches in the Agile world. Here are couple of them. Working with Equally Sized Stories Don Wells, an early Extreme Programmer who worked on the Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation System project (the birthplace of XP), mentioned in 2001 working with similarly sized small stories in each sprint. They worked in weekly sprints. In a week, on average they used to deliver 8 stories. Similar idea have been mentioned by Henrik Kniberg as well in his famous “Agile Product Ownership in a Nuts ..read more

As we understand, it doesn’t make sense to map story points with time just because it will be like comparing apples with oranges. Briefly following problems happen if we map story points with time: During the planning-poker exercise, the focus of the conflict in story points happens because of difference in time estimates among multiple developers instead of focusing around improving their shared understanding of the PBI through poker exercise. It becomes difficult to know how much work the team is accomplishing in each sprint as size of the work doesn’t get measured through such estimation ..read more

Story points are used to arrive at a shared understanding around a PBI within the team. This works when a team works collaboratively. Some teams take a PBI and swarm together to complete it. So a front-end developer does her job, along with a designer and a back-end developer. In other scenarios, a team can have a mix of specialists and full-stack developers. These folks pair up and keep switching from one story to another as part of pair switching.  In all these scenarios, having a shared understanding on a PBI helps. That’s the reason why planning poker and in turn story points work. W ..read more

A section of people doesn’t believe in estimation. The reason they site is that creative process can’t be estimated and it’s supposed to go wrong mostly. If it’s supposed to go wrong anyways, why conduct this futile exercise in the first place. Having said that, what are the reasons to estimate in Agile methods? Before we move further, let’s get the following points straight. It’s important to move towards the outcome (the intent behind a piece of work), work towards the breadth of a feature first and negotiate on the depth (functional richness) of it based on available time and resources. Fo ..read more

Generally, a sprint backlog contains bugs as well apart from user stories. In these situations, a common question is should we assign story points to the bugs. If the team does not assign a story point value to this work, velocity will show the amount of *potential* business value the team is delivering in each sprint. This way, it becomes evident that team is going more slowly through the work than it could if legacy bugs were not there. If the team assigns points to the bug-fixing effort, the team shows its true capacity to accomplish work. This way, it shows both *potential* business value ..read more

Product development continues to remain the primary focus of Agile software development methods. When it comes to Scrum Master role as well, the thought process in general goes towards product development. While we focus a lot on product development and product development companies, a big segment of software development eco-system, IT service companies, isn’t that much talked about. People working in IT service companies can vouch for the struggle they deal with on daily basis. But their stories don’t get enough focus. When it comes to software implementations, IT services companies work for ..read more