What do you do with stories that don’t finish before the end of the sprint? Do we get partial credit? I’m asked that a lot. Everyone wants to know whether to split the story and what to do with the points. Don’t give partial credit for unfinished stories or make untestable splits. Don’t Bother Splitting […]

This is part three in a series on estimating. Part one was “Don’t Estimate Software Defects” and Part two was “Don’t Estimate Spikes”. I don’t estimate stories in sprint planning. Nor do I re-estimate stories in sprint planning. I estimate stories in a separate estimating meeting and usually at least a couple sprints in advance, […]

Create your initial backlog, then stay on top of it. Here’s the how and why of Continuous Backlog Refinement. In my previous article, I talked about compressed backlog refinement in which a backlog is taken from crude to well-groomed in a matter of days through a series of intensive refinement meetings with the whole team. […]

Lots has been written about backlog refinement (what we in the US used to call grooming), and a lot of it is good. There is lots to say about this practice. However, I’ve not seen any treatment on whether you should do it differently for your initial backlog. Therefore, I’m setting out in this post […]

We’ve all seen it happen. Though we try to show organizations the benefits of using a mature agile delivery framework, we still run into roadblocks.  Though the status quo is killing their organization, some barriers to further Agile adoption happen way too often among organizations that need it most.  I recently had a client ask […]