Articles

Professional musings on the craft of delivering software that works as expected, the first time, and without unexpected surprises (we have to set a high bar, right?)

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The Bare Essentials

Why you need software requirements
When software requirements would help
How to gather better software requirements
How to write better software requirements

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Software Requirements

Software requirements
User stories are software requirements
User stories are not specifications
Prevalence of poor quality requirements
Good user stories save time
Poor user stories cost money
Asking users what they want isn’t requirements gathering
Refining user stories effectively
Being a good business analyst
Stop doing business requirements

Product Management

Shipping product and creating value
Product management is hard
Maintaining a healthy backlog
Delegating product ownership decisions
Learning enough to make the next decision
Deciding the colour of the button
Traits of a good product manager
Manage your product, not your people
The product owner who didn’t deliver
Not a fan of planning poker
Becoming less agile to be agile
Moving beyond sprint planning

Software Development

Waterfall and agile, the best of friends
Fixed price agile projects
Defending against poor requirements
Developers want to solve technical problems
Developers decide the implementation
Developers don’t start with a blank sheet of paper
Developers don’t want constant conversations
Having to offshore your development team
Making offshore development work
Remote teams require more documentation
One of the best agile experiences

Organisational Change

Some organisations don’t want agile
The manager too busy for agile
Imagine being an offshore developer
Patterns of enterprise agile dysfunction
Gnarly behaviours of scrum teams
Making agile work for you
Adrian Lander on being agile for 27 years
The responsibility for client change
Blocked tickets during development
Remote developers get blamed
Offshore developers that want every detail