Articles

How story points work

Aug 05, 2009  ·  Sandy Mamoli

One of my clients is a small software development house that does custom development in the form of development projects for clients . I helped them to successfully introduce Agile (Scrum with XP) and both the team and business managers are really happy with it. As they liked our methods of plannin... continue reading

When the red bus hits: Agile when things go wrong

Feb 05, 2009  ·  Sandy Mamoli

There’s a saying in software development “If someone gets hit by the red bus ... “ which roughly translates to that if you lose a project team member or two you still want to be able to get the work done and finish the project. Normally, red busses are rare: The realistic worst case scenario is... continue reading

How to pick a Scrum team

Oct 28, 2008  ·  Sandy Mamoli

I was recently asked by a friend how to pick an Agile team. My friend is a project manager within a New Zealand government department and to deliver an important project he was given complete freedom of choice with regards to project methodology and people. He chose Agile and Scrum as a delivery fr... continue reading

When not to run Agile

Oct 05, 2008  ·  Sandy Mamoli

People keep asking me whether I’d run all projects using an agile framework such as Scrum. When I answer “of course not” they often not only expect but gently try to steer me towards an answer that excludes certain type of projects: “You certainly wouldn’t use it for a mission critical system, woul... continue reading

Design chunking in Scrum

Sept 27, 2008  ·  Sandy Mamoli

When I started with agile (Scrum) software development five years ago one of the main challenges I faced was combining an agile development approach with user-experience driven website design. Especially, as we were working on a global, consumer-oriented web site with a strong focus on product bran... continue reading