How to do Affinity Estimation?

Affinity estimation is just a technique by which story points are assigned to user stories. It’s not an agile methodology. Clients expect estimates and we need to be able to provide them to remain competitive. So, why don’t we do it as best we can? Being practitioners of agile methodologies, we’re already past giving estimates in days and hours, but even story-point estimation can be tricky for all but the most experienced teams. We need a better solution and affinity estimation may be a step in improving software estimation for us all.

Assessment of product ownership

Assumption map as a tool to helps better align what product is expected to do.

Assumption mapping helps you prioritize & focus on what assumptions to test/validate next. i.e. What to learn next, in the sense of Lean Startup’s
“Build, Measure, Learn” cycle. What do we need to learn next? What do we need to measure to learn it? What do we need to build to measure it?
This map helps product owners and their stakeholders better align their assumptions about what their product is expected to do and the people they believe will use their product. This creates a repository of assumptions that can be explored and validated before committing time and money to experimenting, desig...

How to establish a product Discovery Journey?

Most of us are working on solving some pretty hard problems, and it usually ends up taking some fairly complex systems in order to power these solutions. Product Discovery defines what should be built – and why.  Collaboration Is Key.  We are in a big hurry to push something out there in order to learn what works and what doesn’t; yet we don’t want to release something that’s not ready for prime time, and risk hurting our customers and damaging our brand. we need to simultaneously learn fast and also release with confidence. How?

Hiring a product owner? Here are some things you want to know.

Storyboarding - Would you be willing to be this collaborative when creating your backlog?

A storyboard is a sketch of how to organize a story and a list of its contents. Storyboard provides an ideal platform to create user stories and spark conversation in a format that is much less taxing than a wall of text. Use it when creating your backlog.

Dealing with scope creep in agile projects

Scope will change and probably SHOULD change, to increase the likelihood of delivering business value to the customer. This is the same whether you are using Agile or traditional methods. The question is how do we react to this change?

When Product Ownership Fails - PO Anti-Patterns

According to Jim Coplien, “An anti-pattern is something that looks like a good idea, but which backfires badly when applied.” "Do you want a successful product delivery-one that has cost-effective and prioritized product features, that has support from the organization, and acceptance from key stakeholders? If so, you need an effective and available product owner (PO) on your Scrum projects". so..  heres how you wont have one... and ways to avoid it.

Top tips for achieving Flexibility in product roadmapping

A roadmap is a communication tool that helps communicate where you are, where you are heading and how you expect to get there. But it can also turn out to be an ineffective tool that holds non relevant information and wasteful activities for those how needs it or building it. Here's some top tips I've collected from the experts explaining how to keep the roadmap flexible and relevant. Enjoy. 

The Product Manager vs. Product Owner Dilemma- If only it was that easy

Juggling the external/internal workload product views in an organization can be overwhelming for a person and for an organization and sometimes misunderstood. Those two views needs to be successfully integrated into an agile mindset in a fast moving business environment as we have today. We can all agree that we need both views. 

But how? When is the best time to divide PM and Po role. How? What are the dilemmas and pitfalls and what are the expected areas of responsibilities?

Using Use Cases.

What is a use case? How is it written? what's the difference between use case and workflow, or requirement or process? How is it used in agile? And what’s the deferent between use case and user stories? All of these and more in the following Roojoom. 

Enjoy.

User stories Business Value

Although it may look easy user story business value might be really hard to measure. Where do we need to start, do we need to assign value to tons of small user stories ending up with lots of waste? What are the problems with assigning business value? How do we know the business value? And how do we assign it?

User Stories: How to write an effective user story? @BAEXPERTS

Story Points

In simple terms its a number that tells the team how hard the story is. Hard could be related to complexity, Unknowns and effort. this roojoom explains this concept and, do we do it? whats the relation between time estimate and user stories sizing? and how do we scale?

Elephant Carpaccio Exercise

The Elephant Carpaccio exercise was invented by Alistair Cockburnis and it is a great way for software people to practice & learn how to break stories into really thin vertical slices. It also leads to interesting discussions about quality and tech practices.

The Business Value Game

"Agile teams want to deliver maximum business value. That’s easy if the Onsite Customer assigns business value to each story. But how does the Customer do that? How can you estimate business value?

How do you decide between stories? How do you decide between projects? How do you decide between clients?

This game gives you some simple business value estimation techniques that are “good enough” for everyday use."

Too big to be true? Nothing's Impossible.

Are you releasing into production every two weeks, but need to build a feature that's going to take Four months to complete?  How can you do it? Either using grooming methods or Continuous Integration to keep everyone working, or user stories brackdown , or testing? How?

Introduction to Scrum Basics in Less than 10 Minute - My collection Favorites

There are so many short, less than 10 minutes scrum introduction videos. Here's my favorite collection to choose from to learn or train for the basics of the scrum development framework.

The Roles of Scrum Master and Project Manager Debate

The roles of Scrum Master and Project Manager continue to be the center of a debate and confusion as the majority of organizations undergo some degree of Agile transformation. The Scrum Master does not play the part of the traditional project manager. In fact, the Scrum Master is an entirely new role. The Scrum Master and project manager roles are completely different. They both hold characters that clearly distinguish between the two roles and therefore are not suited to be combined.

The Definition of Ready in Agile Development

Ready stories are the output of the product backlog grooming work.   A “ready” item should be clear, feasible and testable. Ready items can be then pulled into the sprint and quickly turned into a product increment. but "ready"concept should apply to the entire life cycle (ready Sprint, story,backlog..  whatever). What Ready really means is that when its ready you have a productivity booster , defects reducer (prevention) and waste reducer. How to we get there? What a Ready Story Looks Like?