Earned Value
Tracking project progress isn’t as simple as you would think. Common questions often include, “are we there yet?”, “are we going to end over budget?”, and “are we going to end past the schedule?” These questions keep people up at night. And the answer, “we’ll be done when we are done,” usually doesn’t fly. Earned…
Read more…
Acceptance Test Criteria: Gaining a Shared Project Understanding
We have several activities that add layers of quality to our software development projects. These activities include unit tests, sprint code reviews, and test plans. Recently, we added another quality layer to our process: acceptance test criteria. This new step occurs at the development story level before any coding begins. The goal is to ensure…
Read more…
How to “CATCH” an MVP
I was recently asked to participate as a panelist for a startup week event to share my experience developing MVPs (Minimum Viable Products). Ahead of the panel discussion, our organizer shared potential questions so each panelist could reflect and create our responses for the audience. Perhaps because I was focused on the MVP acronym, I…
Read more…
Backlog Visualizations: Tables Are Your Friend
Agile backlogs have become the standard tool used by software teams to document, prioritize, and discuss functionality requests. Although agile backlogs are simple to use and easy to implement, they suffer from the same problem as all lists—growing to a point where they become unmanageable. Although Agile methodologies suggest a number of practices to help…
Read more…
Product Development at Nebraska Global / Don’t Panic Labs
Last Thursday we hosted an open house as part of Agile Lincoln’s monthly meetup. We were blown away by how many people showed up to see who we are, learn what we’re doing, and hear me talk about our approaches to software engineering. Since then a number of people have requested the slides and recording of…
Read more…
Project Management – How We Do It
Project management is how software companies manage their various overlapping development efforts while building great software. Likewise, a project manager oversees those efforts. Taking notes, tracking progress, recording milestones, and holding meetings are just a few tasks project managers handle every day. At Don’t Panic Labs, that’s been my role for nearly five years and…
Read more…
Project Management – Retrospectives and Values
This is the fifth and final part of my series explaining how Don’t Panic Labs approaches project management through the lens of a software release cycle. The release is out the door. Now it’s time to reflect on the work that’s been accomplished in the past weeks or months. It’s time for a retrospective. We…
Read more…
Project Management – Iteration Planning and Daily Standups
This is the fourth part of my series explaining how Don’t Panic Labs approaches project management through the lens of a software release cycle. At this point we have our items identified, estimated, and ordered for the release. It’s now time to schedule our iterations. We generally use one week iterations, which we’ve found to…
Read more…
Project Management – How We Estimate
This is the third part of my series explaining how Don’t Panic Labs approaches project management through the lens of a software release cycle. We’ve just finished up initial release planning and have given Rough Order of Magnitude (ROM) estimates to each work item. We came up with a way of estimating that’s worked well…
Read more…
Project Management – Release Planning
This is the second part of my series explaining how Don’t Panic Labs approaches project management through the lens of a software release cycle. How we approach release planning varies, but for this post I’ll focus a common approach we use: Themed Release Cycles. When we begin talking about an upcoming release, we look to…
Read more…
