Scrum Project Planning Board
Wednesday, January 20 2010 - 0 comments
Here is a sneak peek at Axosoft's OnTime V10 Project Planning Board that is especially useful in Scrum: OnTime 2010 WEB Planning Board OnTime 2010 WINDOWS Planning Board You can learn more about Axosoft's OnTime here: OnTime Overview >>...
Scrum on Demand: Getting Started with Scrum
Wednesday, September 30 2009 - 0 comments
So you are sold on Scrum, but having a hard time getting started, right? There are a lot of questions on your mind: How do I convince the team to use Scrum? How long should our sprints be? How should we handle bugs? What if our estimates are not accurate? How do we handle items with dependencies across sprints? What tool should we use to track everything? How do I get my team trained on Scrum? We'll tackle each of these questions in this article. How do I convince my team to use Scrum? Remember that "using Scrum" mostly means the following things: Making a list of things that you need...
Axosoft Offers Free "Scrum with OnTime" Web Class
Saturday, February 28 2009 - scrum, ontime, scrum-class, scrum-training - 1 comments
Since the release of OnTime 2009, Axosoft has been offering Scrum with OnTime, an hour-long instructor-lead, web-based class. Previously, to attend the class, you had to be an Axosoft customer with OnTime 2009 and maintenance. However, for a limited time, this class (OT-302 Agile / Scrum Methods in OnTIme) is being offered free to anybody who is interested in learning how to implement Scrum using OnTime. With the new OnTime 2009 Express pricing of just $5 for 5-user teams, this product, combined with this free class, is the ultimate antidote to recessionary budget constraints! As a pre-requisite...
How Axosoft Published 5 iPhone Apps in 30 Days
Thursday, February 19 2009 - iphone, iphone-apps, iphone-games, mac-development - 5 comments
In The Developer's Incentive to ship, I talk about how at my company, Axosoft , we drive and motivate our software engineers to ship software. Besides the standards of a good work environment, free snacks, drinks and state-of-the-art equipment , we also do something that's a bit out of the ordinary: After every major release of our flagship software, OnTime, we take 30 days to do fun side projects -- preferably ones that are challenging. So when we released OnTime 2009 in the first week of January, our dev team was anxious to get going on their side projects. In our first side-project meeting,...
Scrum Priorities and Buckets
Friday, January 30 2009 - scrum, agile, priority, buckets - 1 comments
More than once, I've heard Scrum Masters express the importance of prioritizing a product backlog in the exact order of priority -- so if you have 100 items in the backlog, the product owner ought to prioritize them from 1 to 100. The argument is that this level of prioritization provides the following benefits: Makes sprint planning that much simpler...the team can take the top priority items for the next sprint If any items are left off in order to complete a sprint on time, the team will know the items that were left out were of lower importance than the items they included. While those benefits...
Should we Implement Scrum?
Friday, January 23 2009 - scrum, agile - 2 comments
Since the release of the Scrum in 10 Minutes video, I've received hundreds of emails in praise of the video and sometimes the sender will also ask a few Scrum related questions. I have decided to start answering some of the more common questions in the AboutScrum blog. Today I received the fourth or fifth occurance of this question: Does Scrum make sense for us? Usually, the question is accompanied by a series of conditions or excuses as to why the sender of the email thinks Scrum might not apply in their case. These excuses can include: We are a new team We are distributed around the city, state...
Building a Great Team
Monday, December 22 2008 - team, best-practices, hiring - 4 comments
The centerpiece of any successful development project is the team that builds it. There is no other single most important contributing factor to building great products. No tools, no development methods, no amount of money and no amount of time can substitute for the importance of an exceptional team if you plan to create an exceptional product. Some in our industry operate under the assumption "with a good system and a fine-tuned set of processes, you can build anything with a group of average Joes." If that sounds like your company, congratulations! You must be that average Joe. The...
Developer's Incentive to Ship
Monday, December 22 2008 - team, best-practices - 0 comments
The company always has a substantial incentive to ship. Usually, it's financial. If you don't ship the software, you can't sell it. If it's an internally used tool or a line of business application, then the company's incentive to ship is to increase user productivity (again a financial incentive). To the company, shipping the software affects the bottom line and the incentive to ship is clear. But what's the incentive to ship for the software developers ? Those are the guys that control the real ship date. In nearly every company I have ever seen, there is virtually no incentive to ship for the...
5 Common Sense Practices to AVOID!
Monday, December 22 2008 - best-practices, agile - 4 comments
There are a number of common-sense software development practices that can actually hurt your chances of success. Here are 5 common-sense items you might want to avoid : 1) Treat Team Members the Same It's common practice and it makes sense. It's fair, right? Treat everyone the same. What could be wrong with that? The origins of the "fairness" practice may come from early childhood when kids discover crying "no fair!" is a great tactic for getting what they want, or maybe it has something to do with the golden rule of "treating thy neighbor as thyself." But in practice...
The Argument for Scrum
Monday, December 22 2008 - scrum, project-management, agile - 3 comments
Successful project management is easy. Successfully executed projects have at least these 3 common elements: Somebody (or everybody) maintains a list of everything that needs to get done, broken down into manageable chunks, with time estimates for completing each chunk; Every team member has a prioritized list of those chunks, which they are responsible for completing; There's at least one person who monitors the progress to make sure things are on track. Perform the above 3 tasks, and your project will have the highest probability of success. Sounds simple, almost too good to be true, but it really...