agile

My company has recently started using Scrum; we've done 2 sprints. We're still learning, but we've definitely exposed and fixed some problems in our development process already. So in general I think it has been good for us. In reading many of the internet musings about Scrum from evangelists, cynics and everyone in between, three common and somewhat contradictory themes have stood out to me: Scrum implementation fails because the processes of Scrum are not followed closely enough. Scrum implementation fails because the organization does not adapt Scrum to its own environment/culture/practices

We have been looking to implement Agile methodology within our geographically distributed development team, so i need suggestions on any free on-line application that you have used and find useful. Right now we are using paper cards and wall to manage this :), but we want to shift to an on-line version preferably free. I have used TargetProcess at my previous job! My Core requirements are: Business Analyst can add user stories We can assign, prioritize different user stories to developers. QA team can add test cases around different user stories. Project Manager can track the time of all the

I believe that Agile is nothing but another implementation of Spiral Model. I am a big supporter of Spiral (The spiral model is a software development process combining elements of both design and prototyping-in-stages, in an effort to combine advantages of top-down and bottom-up concepts) since its beginnings and have seen that lot of projects implement Spiral without knowing that they are operating in a Spiral world. Since the day Agile started gaining popularity the concept of spiral started getting overlooked a little bit. I am sure that for complex projects spiral is still the best

I work in a team which has been doing the traditional waterfall method of development for many years. Recently, we've been told that future projects are going to be moving towards an agile (particularly Scrum) methodology. It so happens that my project will be one of the first, so we will essentially be guinea pigs for the next few months to iron out what it takes to make the transition. The project itself is in a very early stage and we would usually be many months away from releasing anything to the testing team, but now we are going to be working directly with them up front. As a result, I

From this link I assert that a feature is a set of backlog items, but what is an epic supposed to be? The general consensus is that: Product backlog Item is something that can be delivered in a single sprint. Feature is something that can't be delivered in a single sprint, but that can be delivered in a single release. Epic is something that transcends releases. Theme is a cross cutting concern. Theme is generally implemented as a tag in TFS and VSTS. This is a practice that is in line with Scrum Framework, Nexus Framework, and SAfE methodology. ds19 From this link : "Epics are hierarchically

What are the difference between Agile and iterative and incremental development? Is Agile considered as iterative and incremental? Some info shown the Agile is the latest of iterative and incremental. I need a clear clarification on this. Iterative - you don't finish a feature in one go. You are in a code >> get feedback >> code >> ... cycle. You keep iterating till done. Incremental - you build as much as you need right now. You don't over-engineer or add flexibility unless the need is proven. When the need arises, you build on top of whatever already exists. (Note: differs from iterative in

I guess a feature could be something like "credit card authorization", while a user story may be "authorize credit card for paypal". So, is a user story a subset of a feature? Yes, something like a subset. This article is a good read: Features vs Stories Excerpt: I realized today that I hadn't made explicit the difference in my mind between features and stories and it's an important difference. Essentially, a feature is a group of stories that are related and deliver a package of functionality that end users would generally expect to get all at once. For instance, inline table resizing is a

Apparently we use the Scrum development methodology. Here's generally how it goes: Developers thrash around trying to accomplish their tasks. Generally the tasks take most of the sprint to complete. QA pesters Dev to release something they can test, Dev finally throws some buggy code out to QA a day or two before the sprint ends and spends the rest of the time fixing bugs that QA is finding. QA can never complete the tasks on time, sprints are rarely releasable on time, and Dev and QA have a miserable few days at the end of the sprint. How is scrum supposed to work when releasable Dev tasks

When estimating the relative size of user stories in agile software development the members of the team are supposed to estimate the size of a user story as being 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, ... . So the estimated values should resemble the Fibonacci series. But I wonder, why? The description of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_poker on Wikipedia holds the mysterious sentence: The reason for using the Fibonacci sequence is to reflect the inherent uncertainty in estimating larger items. But why should there be inherent uncertainty in larger items? Isn't the uncertainty higher, if we make fewer