Thoughts and conversation from our nomads.
How we measure output and productivity
... getting more stuff done At Trade Me we want to measure the overall health of Tech (that’s our team of 125 designers, developers, testers, BAs, and Squad Masters) to identify trends and to know if we are getting better (or worse!). We know that when we measure something it is a strong way of sayi...
Every day should be Fedex day!
5 things that happen when you let ‘em loose ... Last Friday we had Fedex day at Trade Me. The aim of a FedEx Day is to complete something deliverable within a 24 hour period, i.e. to go from idea to a shippable product within a day. It was fun, lots of great projects saw the light of day and I enjoy...
Could a "Definition of Ready" Help You Strike a Balance?
Many novice teams find it difficult to strike the balance between too much and too little detail when writing user stories. User stories often start their lives as big statements of intent with lots of unknowns and that’s okay. For something that’s not going to be developed in the near future it mak...
Splitting a User Story along Acceptance Criteria
When breaking down a large user story to ensure it is sized appropriately, the default is to use Richard Lawrence’s excellent 9 Patterns for splitting a user story. I also use an additional approach; in the first instance I look to see whether it can be split along its acceptance criteria. Every goo...
Acceptance Criteria and the Definition of Done
Recently some of the teams I’m coaching found it difficult to distinguish between acceptance criteria for user stories and the definition of done. Here’s my attempt to make the distinction clear: For a user story or feature to be "potentially shippable" it needs to meet the expectations of the Prod...
On Acceptance criteria for user stories
One of the teams I have recently coached quickly got a grasp of how to phrase user stories but found it hard to relate to the concept of acceptance criteria. I wrote this short FAQ as an attempt to make it easier for my team to work with acceptance criteria and hope that other teams might find this...