TL;DR — A good user story can be estimated. We don’t need an exact estimate, but just enough to help the rank and schedule the story’s implementation. If the above TL;DR sounds familiar, it’s because it’s practically an exact quote from Bill Wake’s 2003 blog post that introduced the INVEST approach to product backlog items. And sure,…
Tag: Software Development
V is for Valuable - Part 3 of 6 of why it pays to INVEST in your user stories.
TL;DR: Why INVEST in a user story that’s not valuable? Good question. Here’s a pragmatic how-to guide to making the Value magic happen in your PBIs. Step 1 — Avoid Mission Statement Metrics One of my favorite quotes about corporate mission statements comes from Vincent Flanders, who reminds us that most can be summarized generically as “All…
N is for Negotiable — Part 2 of 6 of ‘Why it pays to INVEST in your User Stories’
TL;DR: If you’re looking to INVEST in your user stories by making them Negotiable, then for Pete’s sake don’t write them like requirements. Code by Contract As someone who prefers the Build-Measure-Learn approach to discovering and then delivering the right thing of value at the right time, nothing is scarier than reading the following words from…
I is for Independent — Part 1 of 6 of ‘Why it pays to INVEST in your User Stories’
As an agile team, we don’t want the delivery of our work on story X to be held up by story Y or condition Z. User Story As an agile team, we don’t want delivery of our work on story X to be held up by story Y or condition Z. Description Hi, and welcome…
Why it pays to INVEST in user stories
TL;DR — Love’m or Hate’m, it’s hard to deliver software that matters without user stories that are independent, negotiable, valuable, estimable, small, & testable. Here is one way you might want to make this magic happen. As you may be aware from some of my other posts, I attend some not-to-hush-hush meetups here near Raleigh where product…
Am I the very model of a modern product manager?
With apologies and gratitude to both Sirs Gilbert and Sullivan, I have shamelessly appropriated their famous Major-General’s Song from their popular 1879 comic opera ‘The Pirates of Penzance.’ Based on the raucous reception to my singing the first 2 verses at the end of my presentation “Five Things I Learned About Lean MVP as a…
How to avoid a visit from your friendly neighborhood Technical Debt Collector
TL;DR — Everyone is fine with deferring technical debt, that is until ‘Tony from Support’ shows up w/a bug that breaks your app’s kneecaps. If mob movies were framed as software development, imagine how many story lines would read as follows … … Pamela the Product Owner, desirous of saving “Saint Jerome’s Home for Abandoned Bambinos” from foreclosure,…
Sometimes, a feature toggle may not be enough …
TL;DR — For immense apps with an equally girthy user base, you may want to support early adoption via a feature toggle + group rights combo. Let me state up-front and for the record, I am fully aware that feature toggles are primarily a developer tool to ease the pains of merge madness caused by branch extravaganzas….
Software delivery is a lot like Pizza Delivery
TL;DR — How I pulled an F up to a B+ in grad school with only a pizza box, a prayer, and an assertion that customers don’t give a crap about ‘how’ apps are delivered. Let me tell you a story about how I almost failed grad school by failing to communicate how software delivery is a…
A little about DeanOnDelivery & the nut behind the keyboard.
TL;DR — Who is Dean Peters? Let’s start with experienced agile product manager, recovering programmer, servant leader, mountain biker, grill master, husband, & Dad with a secret past life as a professional opera singer. A grizzled veteran of nearly three decades of delivering valuable software, Dean Peters is a product manager and recovering software engineer working across…