Why Agile Spikes?

What are Spikes in Agile?

A spike is a user story for which the team cannot estimate the effort needed. In such a case, it is better to run time-boxed research, exploration to learn about the issue or the possible solutions. As a result of the spike, the team can break down the features into stories and estimate them.

The term comes from the meaning of the object — a spike allows you to go deep on a problem. A common analogy used is rock climbing. When you cannot go any further, you drive a spike in the rock. It doesn’t allow you to…

Agile Features 101. Real-life examples included.

What is a feature in Agile methodologies?

In Agile methodologies, the features represent a chunk of functionality that delivers considerable business value and fulfills a stakeholder need. Features are a collection of user stories.

“A Feature is a service that fulfills a stakeholder need. Each feature includes a benefit hypothesis and acceptance criteria.” source: © Scaled Agile, Inc. https://www.scaledagileframework.com/features-and-capabilities/

Who writes the Features in Scrum?

The Scrum Guide doesn’t provide any reference to Features. As the products became more and more complex and more and more teams adopt Agile methodologies, there are indications of who defines the Features.

In the Scaled Agile Framework, the Product Manager owns the Features. That doesn’t mean that…

Start today with BDD.

This tutorial is the perfect starting point for product owners, QA, and developers who want to learn the fundamentals of behavior-driven development (BDD) in Agile.

By the end of this tutorial, you’ll know how to:

• What is BDD?
• What are the various steps involved in initiating and executing BDD?
• What are the various phases of BDD?

So let’s get started.

1. What is BDD (Behaviour Driven Development) in Agile?

BDD stands for Behaviour Driven Development. You can think of it as a framework that can improve the collaboration between business teams and technical teams in an organization.

It helps you build a shared understanding of the behavior of the…

Project Management in Discord

Discord Project management sounds like an impossible goal. We have many sophisticated tools for project management. But sometimes, we need to get things done and stay focused. How do we keep project management simple and focused on the actual work directly in Discord?

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, many teams migrate from Slack to Discord as their team communication tool.

And even if you are just by yourself, keeping your work structure and focus is vital for the success of your career.

Here’s how the Orli Scrum bot helps with Project Management directly in Discord:

• Orli connects to the project management of your choice: Trello, Notion.so, …

Do you do bad practice Scrum or you Scrumban?

What is Scrumban?

Scrumban is an Agile methodology that mixes principles from Scrum and Kanban.

The main principles Scrumban takes from Scrum are:

• Short Iterations
• Sprint Planning
• Sprint Review

The main principles Scrumban has from Kanban are:

• Limit work in progress
• Take always the highest priority task and get it done
• Flexible scope

Are you actually using Scrumban without knowing?

Here a list of 5 signs that should raise you some questions:

1. Keep on moving the meetings as the sprint progresses
2. You adapt to change in your backlog
3. The scrum metrics don’t tell much to you
4. Tight deadlines rather than when it can be done
5. There is no specific Product…

Agile in Data Science

Agile in Data Science it’s like no other. Data Science Teams are very different than the other Scrum teams because:

• the result is hard to describe as you never know what’s technologically possible
• the work is always innovative. You haven’t done it before
• the timelines are unpredictable as it’s hard to know how long and how much data you’ll need to reach stakeholders’ expectations.

But also, the Data Science teams are expected to be Agile.

How do we do Agile in Data Science?

Decomposing the scope into research and operational is key in your success of the Agile in Data Science teams.

The data science workflow is a mix between waterfall and iterative:

• Data exploration
• Algorithm research
• more…

Agile in practice

Every day, I hear: when you start building an Agile Product, we need to create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to give it to our beta testers, get feedback, and then have a first version that we’ll commercialize.

The Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is the very first version of a product. It has just enough features to be usable by early customers who can then provide feedback for future product development. When working on the MVP means that the scrum team must avoid any unnecessary work. …

Remote Daily Standup

Daily Standups are challenging in general, but it might break the team if we add the timezone challenges. Screw it!

• set the time one before someone ends his/her working day
• nominate a responsible for updating the project management tools,
• chose one person to make a list of specific topics to clarify in smaller groups after the Daily Standup,
• select a team member to make the list of blockers and responsible
• use scrum bots, e.g., Orli for Discord

Daily Stand-up meeting or Daily Scrum or Stand-up or Daily it has many names, but all of them represent the same thing…