Agile

There’s an enviable quality of great engineers I’ve known: they seem to get things right the first time. When you ask them to do something, and they say “It’s done”, it is, almost always. How? ...

This year I’ve run over 25 Scrum refinement meetings; here’s what I’ve learned. ...

Acceptance criteria, or AC, describe what a feature or bugfix does. Writing them is an art, and some AC work much better than others. So, how do we make them work? By including a little more detail. ...

Jira does have a “Start Standup” button, but it’s hidden and not well documented. ...

I recently calculated that I merge 0.8 pull requests every day into my team repo. “How to Deliver Code Every 0.8 Days” didn’t sing, so let’s say I merge about one PR every day, delivering one or more features to production. I like this velocity, and in this post, I’ll explain how you can achieve it yourself. ...

When I don’t feel like I’m making sufficient progress at work, I have a favorite technique: asking “What would finishing this today look like?” ...

Retrospectives are one of my favorite engineering team practices. In this post, I’ll explain why and how I run retros. ...

When preparing feature development work, I write Gherkin-style tickets, which follow the “Given/When/Then” format. Many people call these stories, and I do, too. This technique is incredibly effective! But why? In this post, I’ll try to answer that question. ...

I’ve been lucky to have worked with some great engineers, and one thing that they tend to do exceptionally well is reporting about their work at meetings. Today I’d like to summarize what I think makes a great standup report. ...

Action items are small, defined, actionable TODOs to follow up on after the meeting. An example: “close all pull requests opened more than 90 days ago.” Agile retrospectives should produce many of these. ...