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Culture & Methods

How Agile Teams Can Improve Predictability by Measuring Stability

In this article, we will present our approach for analysing agile systems as networks of queues and how we have used it to analyse 926 projects in the Public Jira Dataset. We explain how you can measure the Stability Metric (SM) for your queues. Finally, we will present our planned next phase of research.

Rob Healy Brian Fitzgerald Kieran Conboy Tapajit Dey Edwin Lewzey
on Oct 13, 2023
Culture & Methods

User Story: a Placeholder for a Conversation

User stories are meant to be a placeholder for a conversation. This article dives into the differences between user stories and tickets, where stories came from and how recent trends are moving us away from conversations. It shows the impact this is having on product development and easy ways to improve collaboration through conversation and writing better stories.

Kimberly Hendrick
on Sep 28, 2023
Culture & Methods

Your Tech Stack Doesn’t Do What Everyone Needs It To. What Next?

Stack extensibility is an essential trait of well-designed IT ecosystems. Low-code BPA (Business Process Automation) has advantages that puts it at the forefront of approaches to stack extensibility. Learn how low-code software increases process resiliency by empowering business teams with an easy-to-use, easy-to-understand and, most of all, IT-sanctioned set of tools.

Alessio Alionco
on Jan 31, 2023
Culture & Methods

Finding Adequate Metrics for Outer, Inner, and Process Quality in Software Development

Implementing a feature can be measured. Quality is harder to measure. This article explores how to balance improving quality and adding new features. It dives into different domains of quality: Outer quality which is owned by the product people (e.g. product owners, testers), inner quality owned by the developers, and process quality owned by managers.

Michael Kutz
on Jan 19, 2023
Culture & Methods

Are They Really Using It? Monitoring Digital Experience to Determine Feature Effectiveness

This article reflects on the challenges of determining user experience and effectiveness and how modern techniques such as Real User Monitoring and Application Performance Monitoring can determine the true effectiveness of features. It includes stories from banking to show which measures can help agile teams determine not only if features are being used, but diagnose other common issues too.

Carly Richmond
on Nov 01, 2022
DevOps

Netflix Drive: Building a Cloud-Native Filesystem for Media Assets

In this article, Tejas Chopra discusses Netflix Drive, a generic cloud drive for storing and retrieving media assets - a collection of media files and folders in Netflix. Netflix Drive ties together disparate data (such as: AWS S3, Ceph Storage, Google Cloud Storage, and others) and metadata stores in a cogent form for creating, cataloging and serving these assets to applications and workflows.

Tejas Chopra
on Jun 10, 2022
Culture & Methods

Improving Your Estimation Skills by Playing a Planning Game

Underestimation is still the rule, rather than the exception. One bias especially relevant to the estimation process is the planning fallacy. This article explores the planning fallacy and how we are vulnerable to it. It explains how you can reduce your vulnerability to this fallacy through playing a planning game that has been specifically devised to help mitigate it.

Andrew Brown
on Apr 25, 2022
Culture & Methods

Continuous Portfolio Management as a Contributor for Achieving Highly-Aligned, Loosely-Coupled Teams

There is a business need for fast software delivery in order to frequently test business hypotheses and drive development based on the resulting feedback. Organizations need to rapidly decide on what to build next, using a short feedback loop that greatly reduces the risk of running on untested assumptions for too long. This article explores a journey towards continuous portfolio management.

Vladyslav Ukis
on Mar 16, 2022
Culture & Methods

Using the Problem Reframing Method to Build Innovative Solutions

Building products that customers love relies heavily on the problem space: how well you know your audience and how clear are the pain points and main problems your users are facing. This means that the solution to a problem depends on how we frame the problem. This article provides different practices and tools on how to apply problem reframing underpinned by a real case study.

Sebastian Straube
on Mar 10, 2022
Culture & Methods

Using Machine Learning for Fast Test Feedback to Developers and Test Suite Optimization

Software testing, especially in large scale projects, is a time intensive process. Test suites may be computationally expensive, compete with each other for available hardware, or simply be so large as to cause considerable delay until their results are available. The article explores optimizing test execution, saving machine resources, and reducing feedback time to developers.

Gregor Endler Marco Achtziger
on Feb 22, 2022
Culture & Methods

Applying Software Delivery Metrics and Analytics to Recover a Problem Project

Problem software delivery projects can be recovered mid-flight if Value Stream Management (VSM) analytics are used in a forensic way to uncover the root-cause of the issues. The root-cause metrics areas considered include: People Availability; Team Stress; Backlog Health; Sprint Accuracy; Process Efficiency; Story Management; and Defect Gen. A root-cause RAG reports shows key mitigations.

Charlie Ponsonby
on Nov 03, 2021
Culture & Methods

How to Decide in Self-Managed Projects - a Lean Approach to Governance

Whether self-managed or self-governed as a project, the power still needs to be distributed internally. If the project is open to decide how things are done, how do we decide? A solid but flexible set of tools and practices like sociocracy is a great starting point for projects to have clear but lean processes that can grow as we grow.

Ted Rau
on Sep 30, 2021