http://chrissterling.gettingagile.com Harmony with Agile and Architecture Tue, 26 Aug 2008 21:52:14 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en "The team continues to complain about working with that legacy codebase because it has so much software debt. That software debt slows them down in feature delivery and they are wondering if we can push for priority to be put into paying it back some?" asked the ScrumMaster. The IT ... http://chrissterling.gettingagile.com/2008/08/25/the-it-managers-dilemma-with-software-debt/ A few years ago I was privileged to be on a team with some excellent developers where I currently work, SolutionsIQ. One of whom saw the need to stabilize development on an incredibly unstable codebase with no tests. He came to the team with a proposed tool that he slapped ... http://chrissterling.gettingagile.com/2008/08/25/beat-cross-site-scripting-issue-with-storytestiq/ Last week I was invited to participate in a LAWST-style workshop on Technical Debt. I was honored to be there with such a great group of people from diverse industries and experiences. Preface: I am writing this blog entry for myself and therefore it may not be as useful to those ... http://chrissterling.gettingagile.com/2008/08/21/technical-debt-workshop-a-perspective/ Agile 2008 was an interesting experience for me. It was the first time that I went to a conference and felt like I knew a large portion of the participants. I am not sure what this means but I had fun meeting up with friends and acquaintances. Bas Vodde, a Certified ... http://chrissterling.gettingagile.com/2008/08/19/reflections-on-agile-2008/ At the last Scrum Trainer's Retreat in Boston, MA, Lowell Lindstrom presented a 30-minute exercise on Affinity Estimating. Kane Mar has written a short blog entry on this technique for sizing a large Product Backlog here. I would like to add some context for the exercise and a ... http://chrissterling.gettingagile.com/2008/07/04/affinity-estimating-a-how-to/ One of the most common questions in teaching and coaching agile processes to groups is: "How do we design our software while delivering iterations of potentially shippable product increments?" Scrum, an agile process that I teach about and coach organizations on implementation of, asks that each Sprint, analogous to an iteration, delivers ... http://chrissterling.gettingagile.com/2008/06/02/the-wright-model-for-describing-incremental-architecture/ While coaching teams I have found the creation of a Working Agreement as an essential step for a Team to initialize their adoption of an agile framework. I have also noticed that the ideas behind along with the process of creating a Working Agreement is not widely understood by ... http://chrissterling.gettingagile.com/2008/05/02/creating-a-team-working-agreement/ At a recent Seattle Scrum users group meeting I presented on the topic of "Managing Software Debt". Here is a link to a PDF of the presentation and the following is a description of the topic: The Product Backlog in Scrum is used to prioritize implementation of features into software ... http://chrissterling.gettingagile.com/2008/05/02/managing-software-debt/ An article I wrote in the summer last year is now on the Scrum Alliance web site.  The article focuses on value when deriving user stories for your Product Backlogs and describes a step-by-step process for running the value-driven user stories exercise.  Here is a link to the article directly: Focus ... http://chrissterling.gettingagile.com/2008/03/02/focus-on-value/ Michael Krigsman provided an interesting variation of why blind dates so often fail and changed blind dates to project plans. The interesting piece to me is the overlap area identified as "rare".  I speak to many folks about their project expectations compared to plans and one phrase which comes up often ... http://chrissterling.gettingagile.com/2008/02/24/what-can-cause-it-projects-to-fail/