Product Manager
I like that we have a Definition of Ready for our stories. As a Product Owner it gives me confidence that I’ve done my job properly in analysing and communicating the requirements, and also that the team is ready to hit the ground running when the sprint starts. Lately, however, it’s been more of a …
The whole subject of measuring performance of agile teams is a divisive one. In an ideal world we should be looking to measure the value delivered by a team, rather than collecting performance statistics. After all, our primary goal in agile is to deliver some value to the product or customer. But measuring value isn’t …
How often does your sprint goal or stories change in the middle of the sprint? A late-breaking requirement or bug comes in, or a manager pops up with an urgent task, and before you know it your sprint is totally overloaded. Does that sound familiar? Teams often think they’re being agile by responding to changing …
Have you even been to sprint planning and realised that the so-called stories are a bunch of crap? One-line JIRA tickets that the team haven’t seen before? Then you need to enforce a Definition of Ready. We can be good about tracking the progress of stories once they’ve been added to a sprint. We track …
In the olden days of waterfall development, you had teams of Business Analysts that all sat together. When a junior BA joined an organisation, they had a number of colleagues sat around them that they could call upon for advice and help, and lots of time for requirements documents to be reviewed and revised before …
It was great to go along to the Agile-Lean Ireland conference yesterday at Croke Park. The event attracted over 500 delegates – over double the amount from last year – from all over Ireland and beyond, and some top-quality Irish and international speakers. It’s great to see the Agile community so engaged with sharing their …
One of the exciting roles I play in my organisation is passing on some of my knowledge of agile working to new colleagues. I’ve delivered a few Agile Overview courses during the last few months, primarily for new Product Owners and Scrum Masters – but also for some of the developers and managers as well. …
When things go wrong, it can be tempting sometimes to think that people have deliberately caused the problem. It’s the basis of conspiracy theories. We imagine that governments and faceless corporations have gone out of their way to mislead or damage us in some way. When in actual fact, pretty much everything bad that happens …
After around 8 years service in the choir stalls at Christ Church, I’m due to hang up my cassock for the last time at the end of June 2015. I joined the choir as Lay Vicar in April 2007, having just moved to Dublin from Edinburgh. I knew nobody in the city, had no job …
Have you heard of the Internet of Things? The idea behind it is that more and more of the electrical gadgets in our life are going to be internet-connected. The example that the media always used when talking about the Internet of Things is a internet-connected fridge, which knows when you’re running low on milk, …