Something common I’ve seen in effective agile teams is that testing has found a new home at the heart of development. I’m not referring to developers doing test-driven development to create code that is simpler in design and has testability engineered into it. I’m referring to testers working among developers doing continuous exploratory testing on vertical slices of stories still in progress.
Tag: technical-debt
Sunday, 25 March 2012
Thursday, 9 February 2012
Pursuing features increases total cost of ownership
Posted by Simon Baker
I suspect lots of decisions are made because they bring short-term benefits despite there being long-term risks. I've seen agile teams pushed for feature after feature with the business owner citing business value prioritization. Certainly there is commercial pressure for features but how many of these features have been validated with users? Is the demand real?
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Friday, 29 October 2010
Stopping the line to run with zero known defects
Posted by Simon Baker
At the Agile Evangelists Meetup last night, I said something like “we run with no known defects”. Thank you to Rick Vugteveen for asking me to clarify this. When we discover a defect we take steps to fix it as quickly as possible. It's a take on the Lean manufacturing concept of stop the line. We do this in two ways.
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Sunday, 7 March 2010
Effectiveness of a real product stream
Posted by Simon Baker
I've pulled together some data for the first year of a product stream we created and plotted it as charts for throughput, rework and effectiveness.
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Friday, 26 February 2010
Inevitable and avoidable rework
Posted by Simon Baker
Without really thinking about it until now, I've been seeing two types of technical debt. The first is the quick solution implemented with dirty code. I consider this to be irresponsible. That's not to say I won't do it, just that if I decide I should do it I make sure the necessary people understand the consequences and that it's an irresponsible action to take.
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Comments: 3
Wednesday, 24 February 2010
A simple measure of effectiveness
Posted by Simon Baker
In the Lean manufacturing world there's a measurement called First-Time-Through (FTT), which monitors whether a cell is making products right the first time. It's a measurement of the effectiveness of the cell's standardized work and shows the percentage of product made without any need for rework or scrap.
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Comments: 10
Monday, 2 November 2009
How we use stories
Posted by Simon Baker
All our work items, both user-focused and technical, are stories framed in the context of a user interacting with the product. Each story represents a distinct, visible and testable piece of work that can be delivered independently to realize some value. Stories exist at many levels of specificity and never convey solutions. For example, at a point in time it's sufficient to use an ambiguous story to describe an interaction as simply an activity a user engages in using the product. At some time later, typically when detail starts to matter, smaller stories are written to describe that activity in terms of more specific tasks the user performs with the product.
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Comments: 2
Friday, 29 August 2008
Monday, 21 November 2005
Repaying technical debt
Posted by Simon Baker
Circumstances often place developers in a situation where they face the decision: Do I write a cheap and nasty solution in order to move forward now? Or do I take more time to solve the problem properly and risk delivering less business value by the end of the sprint? In this situation, an agile developer should do the right thing.
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