Blog
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Do you call it Refinement or Grooming?
I don’t know about you, but the word ‘grooming’ has some very negative connotations for me. It can be used entirely innocently – such as in the context of pet grooming, or for personal grooming – but certainly here in Ireland and the UK the word is often associated with child exploitation and abuse. So…
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Splitting user stories
Sometimes it’s hard to break down a user story into smaller parts. There’s a piece of work, and it seems that it all needs to be done together, but it’s much too large to fit into a single sprint, so what do we do? Horizontal vs Vertical It’s often tempting to slice a story horizontally.…
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Working from home as a Product Owner
With many companies around the world asking staff to work from home during the current COVID-19 virus outbreak, we’re all having to adapt to a new way of working. So how do we, as Product Owners / Managers, help keep our team productive during this time? Communication is everything When everyone is working from home…
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How do we manage bugs?
We had one of our Client Managers complaining recently that their urgent bugs hadn’t been fixed, and so a meeting was called to discuss it. There were various opinions expressed: “We should fix these particular bugs more quickly” “We should get each team to take more bugs in during sprint planning” “We should set up…
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Mario and Julia are new starts
Both are junior members of staff without much prior experience. Mario is taking on his first role as a Product Owner and Julia is a Developer. How are they both supported and trained when they join their agile squad? Julia joins a team of experienced developers, and she can spend some time shadowing other team…
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Are my user stories too long?
As a Product Owner its tempting to try and capture as much detail as possible on a user story. I might start with a simple requirement, but then end up adding loads of additional information! Of course, we all know that a user story, at its essence is just meant to be a statement in…