Many Agile teams have an ordered list of items to be worked on, where the most important items are at the top of the list, and the least important items are at the bottom of the list. It is a common practice for the items at or near the top of the list to be...Read More

Some teams employ a method that helps them rapidly categorize a group of concepts or ideas based on shared attributes. The affinity grouping technique is particularly helpful in a brainstorming or other ideation context, where individual members of a team first write down concepts or ideas, on Post-it Notes or their digital equivalents. The members...Read More

Some teams use a technique that enables rapid comparison of a potentially large set of work items with little discussion about each individual item, by grouping the work items based on their relative size. For collocated teams, a common approach to affinity estimation is to write a brief description of each work item on index...Read More

There is a test-first approach to software development, where three activities are tightly coupled: writing a unit test, writing code, and improving the test and code. Some practitioners use the shorthand of Red – Green – Refactor to refer to Test Driven Development (TDD). The first step in the process is to write a failing...Read More

There is a software development approah which leverages practices that originated with Test Driven Development (TDD), adding a user behavior-centric focus. Behavior Driven Development (BDD) employs domain-specific language (DSL) to express both user behaviors and the expected outcomes from those behaviors in each unit of work, or “user story.” It’s helpful to think “from the...Read More

There is an approach to software development where people with different perspectives collaborate to write acceptance tests before implementing a particular feature, with emphasis on the perspective of an customer or end user. In Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD), a common method is have people with different backgrounds and expertise involved with writing tests. For...Read More

There is a framework that is popular among Agile teams, which helps them manage product development and other “knowledge work” through empirical process control. In this framework, called Scrum, there is a repeating cycle where teams establish a hypothesis by building something small, testing the hypothesis, reflecting on the experience, and making adjustments based on...Read More

There is a method that helps teams visually manage the way work flows though a system, for instance, through their work queue. Kanban takes its name from the Japanese word for placard or billboard, where in a manufacturing context, a board can signify where each item is in the work flow. It is an Lean...Read More

Many organizations benefit by applying certain values, principles, techniques and practices that have been proven to work in a variety of environments, including manufacturing and software development. Many of these ideas originated from the Toyota Production System (TPS). The usage of the term “Lean” in conjunction with software development first occurred in the early 2000s,...Read More

In Scrum, there are several artifacts, and one of them is the set of Product Backlog Items that a team brings to completion by the end of an iteration (Sprint). Anything included in that set of Product Backlog Items, which is called the Increment, must be “Done,” which means that the product is in usable...Read More