2 months ago

To estimate or not to estimate [bugs]?

By Piotr Nowinski

In Agile

2 months ago

09December

At some point in time, many Agile teams struggle with how to handle bugs and/or maintenance tasks they are faced with. And the core of this problem is whether bugs should be estimated or not. As always, each approach has its pros and cons, but based on my experience I reckon that estimating bugs is not worth the hassle. Let me explain why. Bug is a waste The main goal of every Agile team is to...

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4 months ago

Innovation is easy, isn’t it?

By Piotr Nowinski

In Agile, Team leadership

4 months ago

05October

Early this year Harvard Business Review published an interesting article about innovative organizations by Gary P. Pisano. Most organizations perceive innovative culture as a key to their future competitive advantage and therefore something leaders want to establish and invest in. Also, employees value innovative organizations and consider them as a great place to work for. Moreover, it seems...

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5 months ago

Too many meetings

By Piotr Nowinski

In Agile

5 months ago

24August

One of the most common complaints you may hear about Scrum is that it introduces too many meetings. Let’s have a closer look at this problem. Summary of Scrum meetings Scrum framework defines several meetings that are designed to address 3 pillars of every implementation of empirical process control: transparency, inspection, and adaptation. All Scrum meetings are time-boxed and for a 2...

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6 months ago

Confessions of a Change Agent (by Henrik Kniberg)

By Piotr Nowinski

In Agile

6 months ago

15July

Recently I’ve come across a presentation “Confessions of a Change Agent” done by Henrik Kniberg at Agile Rock Conference 2018. Highly recommended for everyone who is or wants to be an internal or external consultant helping organizations to improve (well, change). The main points: Attitude not a roleChange is easy if people want itInspire > ChangeSlow down to speed upPlant...

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7 months ago

Limiting WiP is easy, isn’t it?

By Piotr Nowinski

In Agile

7 months ago

24June

Today I came across the following article by John Cutler.

Great summary of why limiting WiP is not that simple and involves many changes to the organization itself.

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8 months ago

Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results 2019

By Piotr Nowinski

In Agile, Team leadership

8 months ago

30May

Few weeks ago Stack Overflow presented the results of their annual Developer Survey. I recommend having a look into that as there are lot of interesting insights in there. Link to the results: Technologies Top 10 of most popular technologies (programming / markup / scripting languages) are: Top 10 of most wanted technologies are: And Python is the fastest-growing major language today. Challenges...

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8 July 2017

Benefits of using Scrum [over waterfall]

By Piotr Nowinski

In Agile

8 July 2017

08July

Agile is probably the best approach when it comes to developing complex IT solutions. It’s widely used in product development, but unfortunately, it’s still not that straightforward when you’re working for external clients. The problem is that in far too many situations it’s the corporate purchasing department that awards the seller with a contract, and fixed-scope, fixed...

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20 May 2017

Tracking progress of the release

By Piotr Nowinski

In Agile

20 May 2017

20May

Having a potentially shippable product every sprint lies in a heart of Agile, but in many organisations – especially the ones that don’t work in SaaS model – a product is not released to the market every sprint. Sometimes frequent delivery is not possible (i.e. in case some additional tasks like a translation of a documentation, legal approval, etc. have to be done at the end of the...

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9 April 2017

Splitting large features into smaller stories – Elephant Carpaccio

By Piotr Nowinski

In Agile

9 April 2017

09April

Many teams transitioning to Agile struggle with delivering a potentially shippable product every sprint. Producing a piece of software that provides a business value to a client every 2 weeks seems impossible. Usually, teams say that they can deliver either front-end, or backend, or architecture design for a given feature, but not all these together. It’s a common problem for many teams...

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26 February 2017

Transparency

By Piotr Nowinski

In Team leadership

26 February 2017

26February

Transparency is a key value in Agile organisations. It improves employees’ motivation and make the teams perform better. At the same time, transparency is difficult to achieve, because it usually requires serious changes to company’s culture and mindset. You can’t do it overnight, but fortunately, each and every step towards this goal counts. Transparency allows for building an...

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