Archive for the ‘process’ Category

A Few of Our Burn-Down Graphs

Monday, March 2nd, 2009

More than a month ago, I promised to show you a few burn-down graphs. As you now know, we hibernate during winter in the arctic areas, but now it's spring (!), so I'll get going. I'll be showing burn-down graphs for a project we started to create a spanking new product. ...

The Burn-Down Graph

Monday, January 19th, 2009

The burn-down graph provides the team with visual feedback on the sprint progress. The process of setting up a realistic burn-down graph is imperative. In this post, I'll get into why and how. I have been eager to share more from our experiences with Scrum. Some might remember our Scrum-series from ...

The Power of Feedback

Monday, November 10th, 2008

This post is really about our broken comment system. We are suckers for feedback here at Aptoma. We hold listening to the right sources of feedback as core for improvement in the right directions. As I frequently mention: without feedback there is little chance of improvement. In fact, the possibility to ...

6 Months In: Our Scrum Experiences

Thursday, November 6th, 2008

We've been scrumming for about 6 months. It's been great fun, and it's about time for a recap. This post covers the benefits and challenges discovered so far. Also, we offer some warnings to anyone currently considering to adopt scrum. 3 Benefits Team communication has improved. There's less of the "I'll go ...

Estimation Using Planning Poker in Scrum

Friday, October 10th, 2008

To do estimates we use planning poker. The concept is really simple. Here I'll tell you how. The cards Everyone gets their stack of cards, from which one picks one card per round of estimating a task. The numbers represent hours, "?" means just what you think ("I have no clue") and ...

Scrum Basics – Now With Goobledygook, an Image and References

Friday, September 12th, 2008

Scrum, Scrum, Scrum. We've been covering Scrum in such detail it makes you sick. And now we've finally covered it all (the basics, that is). I'm still quite sure we'll be returning with more rationale, elaborations and goobledygook in general. This will to some degree be a copy of the Scrum ...

The Retrospect – Even Better Next Time!

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

I have already asserted that without feedback, there can be little or no improvement. And we need to provide and receive feedback to improve ourselves and our team members. This post is part of our Scrum-series, and we have arrived at the fifth and last activity in the Scrum-process (according to ...

The Demo (The Sprint Review)

Thursday, August 21st, 2008

It's demo-time! (Play theme from Knight Rider here, and visualize The Hoff). This post is part of our Scrum-series. The Team has been hard at work for a month, and time has come to show off what have been accomplished. So How Did We Ever Get This Far? Revisiting our stripped down definition ...

Software Engineering is an Art Form

Monday, August 18th, 2008

Here he goes again, you might be thinking, pounding his chest and asserting that creating great software is like creating any other form of art.But I'm telling you, the process of creating great software is an intellectual and creative effort, which in many ways are very similar to the process ...

The Sprint (part 2/2) – The Daily Scrum

Friday, August 15th, 2008

This is the second post about The Sprint in Scrum. Read the first one here. The Daily Scrum Meeting is the continuous inspection and adaptation mechanism of Scrum. The Team inspects its own efforts, and adapts to new information. To put the Daily Scrum into the larger picture, have a look ...