Kerry Buckley

A colleague recently posted (on an internal wiki, so unfortunately I can’t link to it) about the problem of people thinking that common agile “tools” such as whiteboards, index cards, freehand burndown graphs etc are a bit “Blue Peter,” and therefore not professional. He made a good suggestion, which was that you provide teams that are new to agile with official branded materials (story cards, pre-printed blank burndown charts and so on). They will accept these more readily, and will then embrace the underlying ideas and start using any old flipchart or whiteboard.

Here’s another argument for simplicity – admittedly from the world of TV fiction – which I’d put to people who think low-tech solutions are somehow not fit for purpose.

I’ve just come across an old Agile Chronicles post about burndown patterns, which makes the following observation:

Flat-line (i.e., zero net progress) – a flat-lined burndown chart may have a number of explanations:

• The team may have been pulled to work on other projects or priorities (i.e., another project, support and maintenance) and has left the current project helpless to succeed.
• The team may be completing work at an expected rate, but new features and/or tasks are being added to the iteration or project as fast as work is being done.
• Defects and rework may be preventing real progress from being made.

We looked a while ago on our project at how to make at least the second of those possibilities explicit on the graph, and came up with a simple solution, which I thought I’d share here. I’m sure it’s not original, but it doesn’t appear to be all that common either, so someone might find it useful.

Some people tend to raise their eyebrows a little when people talk about agile software development being more “fun”, and question whether something you’re paid to do can, or should, be fun.

I like low-tech prototyping solutions, and here’s a simple (some might say trivial) one that worked well at a recent release planning meeting, for discussing some minor GUI changes with the users.