I’ve long struggled with the concept of Story Points and how to effectively communicate this to clients. It’s never been a natural concept for me, and most explanations of Story Points are half baked. Explanations such as “Story Points are relative measure of complexity”; are quickly countered with “What about situations where something is not complicated by takes a long time to build?”
Most Agile practitioners end up trying to cover all bases by defining Story Points as some measure of both size and complexity [3].
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Filed under: Agile Software Development, Estimating, Planning, Project Management, Scrum
With the increased interest in Agile software development, Agile coaching has become more and more popular. Companies are introducing Agile coaches to their teams firstly as contractors and then as permanent staff. They often do this without fully considering the role of the Agile coach within the organisation, or of a career path for the coach.
To make the situation even more difficult, the attributes that are appropriate for an Agile coach are quite different than those for traditional project management. For example, rather than being able to track individuals and tasks, the Agile coach needs to know how to motivate the team into forming a self organizing group.
This article discusses what some of those attributes are, and presents a model for maturing Agile coaches.
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Filed under: Agile Software Development, Project Management, Scrum
In the realm of software development there is a board spectrum of different processes currently in use; from the very complex where each and every change to is analysted and designed many different different ways, to chaos where changes occurs without control or testing.
My good friends Alex Pukinskis, Jason Lewis, and I were discussing Agile software processes and where they placed on a graph relative to other methodologies and chaos. Alex drew the graph which I’ve shown below. I’ve seen this diagram reproduced by other people since, but because Alex was the first to introduce me to it, I’ve called it the Pukinskis Graph.
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Filed under: Cultural Change, Project Management
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