BrainsLink

Teamwork is hard. To be good at any agile discipline from Scrum to XP to TDD to Kanban, etc., you need teamwork and lots of it. Many people think that if they are communicating, they are working as a team. Yet communicating is only the first step toward building a team. You can be a […]

I worked on a project where the software development team provided rapid response to user requests. We’d meet with the business team leaders every week. Often, they would ask for a change or a new feature and it would be delivered before the next meeting. Of course, some requests were larger or in a few […]

I’m sure you’ve read that only drug dealers and software developers call their customers ‘users’. When it comes to agile software development, simply calling everyone who will run your software, ‘user’, is a problem. Agile software requirements are usually captured as stories following a structured format like this: “As a <user role> I want <goal/desire> […]

If you have four software developers, a Scrummaster and a product owner, do you have a team? Is that all it takes to assemble an agile team? Forming an agile team is not easy. Most often, a group of people are assembled and given a common corporate goal. They create a plan and start working […]

Every team needs good people. Great teams need superstars, that is, one or more top-notch contributors. Agile teams are no different. A team composed of average contributors will produce average work. If you’re lucky and the team collaborates really well, you may get above average results — unlikely, but possible and worth striving for. A […]

This is a good question…initially you must find out if you have a certain type of personality to accomplish software testing. You need to be organized, logical and thorough. You are going to be writing test cases determined by business and functional requirements – or you should be. Then you’ve got to implement those tests […]

It’s tough to be agile when team members collide. Heck, it’s tough to just get anything done when you have members on the team that don’t get along. It’s unfortunate but it happens — often. Why can’t we all just get along? Hostilities develop for many reasons. At times, it seems that there is no […]

The week between Christmas and New Year is historically focused on family, not business. Plenty of business gets done, but staffing and intensity levels are reduced. We all need time to unwind, decompress, chill out or simply relax. It seems that many of us make ourselves available 7 days a week, 16-24 hours a day. […]

Dealing with the business users of a software application can be a real challenge. It’s rare that you find a user group that embraces agile software development and wants to actively participate in the process. There are two predominant types of business groups that you’ll encounter in agile development. The first is a business group […]

A blog post at the Harvard Business Review, “Why Best Practices Are Hard to Practice”, is worth reading for anyone trying to introduce agile practices into a waterfall shop. The two key ideas in the article are: Introducing a new process into an organization requires adaptation. Just because an approach worked in another firm doesn’t […]

The one word that best encapsulates the spirit of an agile project is teamwork. You cannot be truly agile without teamwork. You may want to be. You may think you are. You may even use agile techniques. But if your “team” members are favoring their individual agendas; if they are more interested in personal goals; […]

I sat in a meeting today where we discussed extracting data from one database and inserting it into another. Someone made a well-intentioned comment in an effort to reduce the amount of work needed. Then, a major argument ensued. One side felt that the extra work had to be done while the other side felt […]

You’ve likely read the twelve agile principles at agilemanifesto.org. There is a lot of food for thought in those words. One of the the principles is particularly difficult for traditional managers to follow: “Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.” It’s […]

Have you heard the semi-famous quote widely attributed to Woody Allen? “80% of success is showing up.” It’s good advice for everyone on your project team. Let’s first define “showing up”. A physical appearance at the office is not enough. In fact in today’s virtual world, a physical appearance may not matter at all. What […]

Big companies love the waterfall approach to software development. Why? It’s simple really. Most big companies thrive on the command and control approach to management. (Yes, it’s rooted in military history.) It works something like this: Define the goal. Prepare a plan to achieve the goal. Assemble the troops. Yell “charge” and schedule weekly status […]