Agile It!
Issue 13 — September 2018
A monthly agile round-up of the latest tips, tricks and techniques from around the web!
Greeting Agile Aucklanders!
In this thirteenth issue of Agile It! We investigate why your product backlog should look like an iceberg. Take a closer look at how tracking tools can help you manage better projects and why visual story mapping techniques and technologies provide an advantage over traditional methods. Plus some more fun agile games — this and a whole lot more from around the net!
Insights
To kick things off, Mike Cohn discusses why your product backlog should look like an iceberg. The theory being that at the top of the product backlog iceberg are the high-priority features the team implements soon.
These items are small and should contain enough details that each can be developed, tested, and integrated within a sprint. Further down the product backlog (or iceberg in this example), items are larger and less detailed as we approach the waterline. Well worth the read.
Closer Look
In this section, we take a closer look at how issue tracking tools help you manage better projects. The article discusses how project managers and their team need to state issues as tasks to clearly talk about the problem, priority, deadline, and who needs to act on it. An issue tracking system can help process these requirements into a wonderful work flow that you cannot go without.
We also take a closer look at why visual story mapping techniques and technologies provide an advantage over traditional methods in this article:
This article discusses how classic children’s fables can teach us all about work-life balance lessons.
Fun Games
Finally, this section is probably my favourite and enjoyable part of the blog. This article highlights the rules of the game Agile 101.
Both of these articles discuss some different ways to run a fun retrospective. First one is Marginal Gains, the aim is for participants to look for quick wins, simple as that!
Finally, we look at SWOT: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
Enjoy the rest of September, and the start of Spring! We hope to see you at an Agile Auckland event real soon!
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