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Once upon a time, there was a brilliant developer who got everything they thought they wanted – a promotion to CTO.
Every day, they would look at their dashboard showing im…
Despite expanding an engineering team and investing in advanced tools, delivery timelines worsened due to a misleading focus on individual productivity over system productivity. Increasing developer numbers led to communication overhead, dependency conflicts, and context switching. Shifting to flow-centric metrics improved collaboration and sustainable productivity, enabling faster, higher-quality delivery.
Timeboxing is a vital practice in Agile methodologies, enhancing productivity and predictability. It structures work within iteration-based frameworks like Scrum and XP, creating urgency and facilitating planning. In continuous methodologies like Kanban, it maintains focus and allows for efficient process improvements. Overall, timeboxing drives measurable outcomes and sustainable productivity across various environments.
Extending deadlines in software projects often reduces productivity, as evidenced by the ‘Beginning, Middle, and End’ cycle. Adopting shorter two-week? iterations enhances focus, feedback value, and engagement, while maintaining a sense of urgency. This approach stabilizes team velocity and promotes effective breakdown of tasks, ultimately optimizing workflow and delivering quality outcomes.
Progress meetings, or Daily Scrums, are essential for team progress and adaptability in software development. However, many teams fall into common traps, such as only reporting tasks instead of fostering collaboration. With remote work and dynamic team structures, it’s crucial to adapt these meetings to encourage open discussions, diverse participation, and effective communication.
This post presents Brook’s law as a systemic issue, and how to interpret it for agile projects.
Planning Poker has become the de facto estimation technique in agile teams. Like many agile practices, it elegantly packages theoretical concepts into a practical, easy-to-follow process. This post explores the hidden foundations of Planning Poker by combining three powerful ideas: measurement theory, research on cognitive anchoring effects, and the Delphi estimation technique. Understanding these underlying principles helps teams move beyond just following the process to truly mastering the art of collaborative estimation.
Team composition and performance can be engineered. Thereby, the context can be designed so that a group of people can be led into a high-performing team. This context must focus on establishing shared experiences and responsibilities, rather than relying solely on team-building exercises.
Second installement of the How to interpret Velocity to improve your agile team productivity.
This article will detail the information contained in each metric and how to use it to improve team productivity.
Velocity is a commonly used metric in agile teams. It is a great metric due to its apparent simplicity. However, I often see teams drawing the wrong conclusions for the metric, which results in decreased productivity.
This post is the beginning of a three-part series to convey my understanding of how to make sense of the information that velocity, as a metric, can provide to an agile team. And use this information to improve the team’s productivity.