With this post I want to shed some light on my experiences with Sprint Burndown charts. Especially the question of who owns the Sprint Burndown chart and is responsible for drawing it. In case it is not presented on a flip chart, the matter will be about who maintains the status in the used tools. Should it be done by the team that implements the software or should it be done by the person responsible for planning the scope, the product owner. In Scrum, a method of agile software development, should it be possible that the scrum master or agile coach draws the Sprint Burndown chart? Before we narrow down the topic, let’s look at what a Sprint Burndown chart is good for. A Sprint Burndown chart is a chart …

Should You Draw The Sprint Burnbown Chart? Read more »

Are your estimates for the duration of tasks not accurate enough? Do you spend more or even less time than you thought you would? This is particularly unpleasant when time is limited. Accurate estimates of task needs practice. The bigger the task the less accurate your estimate usually is. Inaccurate estimates sum up and make it difficult to plan. Completion of larger work items is more difficult to predict due to a sum of inaccurate task estimates. The estimate is therefore not useful for planning. Having experienced this in several teams, I thought of a way to test estimates and improve them. This simple exercise helped to do just this. It can be applied to any task that you are facing. Before starting the task, write down an estimation of how long you think you …

Improve Yourself – Accurately Estimate Tasks Read more »

„Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much“ Helen Keller Collaboration is the subject of this post. You will learn about „customer collaboration over contract negotiation“ with considerations for daily use in software development. Collaboration is the keyword. It is hard to imagine software development undertakings that go without contracts. With “customer collaboration over contract negotiation”, all negotiations should happen collaboratively. This means that negotiations are transparent with no hidden agendas. Pricing should be fair for all parties. If a software development undertaking starts with hidden intentions, it will become difficult to work together in a truly agile manner. One of the values of agile software development, trust, is missing from start in this case. This doesn’t mean …

Unfold The Agile Manifesto – Part 1 Read more »

Checking out a shopping cart or shopping cart checkout flow is the process that comes after shopping. This happens when the user is done adding products to his basket. In the checkout phase, a shopping basket filled with items becomes an actual order. This is an essential process in any online shop, since this is when users convert to buyers. With this objective, the checkout process should boost users confidence in the online shop and run smoothly. In this post we won’t focus on the layouts and contents of each page that is part of the checkout flow but on the flow itself. Pages of the checkout flow, for example cart details, will be covered in additional posts that will follow. The checkout process starts after you have added …

Shopping Cart Checkout – What You Need To Know! Read more »

User Stories and their Acceptance Criteria as the base of implementation work is shown by the example of drawing a house in this post.

User Stories are commonly used in context of Agile software development but that’s not a limitation. Acceptance Criteria will allow you to determine whether or not you have completed the implementation of a User Story.

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