“Decide as late as possible” On the surface this principle of Lean Software Development would seem to suggest that we, as engineers, should put off as many decisions as possible till the last moment. This seems counterintuitive, as creating a working piece of software requires a great deal of planning...

Pro Tips for Onboarding a New Teammate Intro Last month’s blog post, Pro Tips for Joining a New Team, was from the perspective of the reader joining a team. But what if you’re a member of a team that is onboarding a new teammate? Look no further, we’ve got you...

Lets face it, Agile Retrospectives, like all things, can get a little stale when they become too habitual. Maybe you're finding yourself in a rut answering the same old questions with the same old sticky notes, or maybe you're just looking for a fun twist on an already effective routine....

In the world of agile sometimes dates matter, hold on let me finish. The day something goes to production should not be considered firm until closer to delivery. Stakeholders consider a date the date, but in reality, they are really hard to set. They are based on estimates, based on...

This blog is part of a series on end-to-end (E2E) testing in Cypress. In this post, we will take a look at how our team uses Cypress to benefit our workflow and increase the safety in which we deploy new features. This information is available in this presentation I give...

In a previous blog post, Brenda Peshak discussed the “Definition of Done”. As a team, we ran through an exercise to understand requirements and determine Minimal Viable Product (MVP). This got me thinking about real life examples of software and how decisions made by product owners and product managers directly...

Prerequisites This article builds on the prior article: Unit Testing. Shift Left DevOps Before we write code, we look at first principles. A key principle is: “shorten feedback loops”. We can acheive this by automating the steps leading up to validating what we’re building. This is one reason we focus...

I recently presented on the topic of Definition of Done at our Monday Meetup. The purpose of the game was to help our teammates understand what “done” means. As a product owner, I hear a lot of keywords thrown around in the Agile Development process; Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Minimum...

As an Agile coach, I am always reflecting on my experiences and looking for ways to help others improve. Recently I hired a contractor to complete a home improvement project. It didn’t go very well. Let me share what went wrong and how I think using Agile techniques would have...

Now that Agile has become mainstream, teams are looking to go beyond their Agile process to find ways to improve. There has even been recent use of the term “Antifr-Agile”, where process is secondary to product validation and customer learning (AgileDayChicago, 2016). Here are 7 ways that your team can...