Product Owner

Reflecting the Pain of Unrealistic Deadlines

Unrealistic deadlines can be highly stressful. One approach to dealing with them is to reflect the pain back.

Acceptance Criteria

Acceptance criteria are story-specific requirements that must be met for the story to be completed. They are a technique for adding functional detail to user stories. Acceptance criteria are often added during backlog refinement or during the sprint planning meeting.

Scrum teams take user stories into sprints.

For many teams that is the end of the conversation. They do not need anything else to describe the work they are doing and the requirements they plan to do in the future.

For other teams, particularly those with a long product backlog, it may be beneficial to use other terms for requirements. Terms like 'epic' and 'theme'.

The first few steps in an agile transformation are critical to success. Lay a good foundation and what follows will be simplified.

So what is a good way to start an agile transformation?

The following are some common Scrum myths.

Velocity is a measure of performance

Isn't a higher velocity a sign of a more productive team?

The Scrum guide is very clear that velocity is purely about establishing the likely capacity of a team for future sprints. The actual value is irrelevant, it is the predictability that is important.

1. Mike Cohn - Mountain Goat Software

One of the founders of agile, Mike speaks with authority on a number of agile subjects. His focus is slightly more towards the product/project side with less focus on engineering practices.

1. Use the same deployment mechanism for all environments

When you do something often, you get good at it. So deploy to all environments using the same mechanism. That way, when you deploy to production things less likely to go wrong.

When we talk about non-functional requirements we often focus on performance and response times. But there are many other types of non-functional requirements and their obscurity can lead to them being missed.

Here are some non-functional requirements that can get forgotten:

Although not a hard-and-fast rule, I see the tiers of an agile organisation being the following:

1. Strategic tier
2. Product tier
3. Development tier

Strategic tier

The strategic tier is responsible for deciding the long-term goals, such as: