Silver Stripe Blog

There is no way to succeed without good teamwork. Agile requires a collaborative environment in which a cross-functional team can work together. So here are five articles on teamwork from an agile perspective.

• Agile, Multidisciplinary Teamwork: A good article on how to get a diverse cross-functional team to work well, keeping them energized and productive.
• Seven Essential Teamwork Skills: Seven soft skills that every team member need – Active Listening, Questioning, Logical Argument, Respecting, Helping, Sharing, Participating.
• The Seven Pillars of an Agile Team: What are the abilities that team members need to posses? Product Sense, Collaboration, Focus on Business Value, Supportive Culture, Confidence, Technical Excellence, Self Improvement.
• How Not to do Resource Management: An excellent article on creating agile teams: Instead of assigning people to a project, keep the team constant and assign projects to the team.
• Meeting Facilitation for Agile Teams: Facilitation skills for meetings, retrospectives, standups and planning workshops.

I’ve found that the concept of Story Points is one of the most confusing for people to understand. People are so used to estimating in real time – days and hours – that the abstract nature of story points is a bit hard to grasp. To make matters worse, there are different and sometimes contradictory ways of thinking about points. Here is how I think about story points

Continue reading ‘Understanding Story Points in a Scrum Project’ »

Here is the first look at an upcoming product – the Agile Collaboration Desktop.This is an add-on to Silver Catalyst that enables better communication and collaboration between team members, product owners and stakeholders, especially in a distributed team.

The desktop is a native cross-platform app that integrates views into multiple tools so that you don’t have to juggle a lot of browser windows to get your work done.

This is a walkthrough of a preview version of the desktop. Expect to see the final version in about a month. There are three concepts that we are focusing on in this product – Awareness, Collaboration and Conversations. We’ll walk through each one in turn.

Continue reading ‘Announcing the Agile Collaboration Desktop’ »

Mark Levison wrote an nice post called My Challenge to Agile Tool Vendors which caught my attention for obvious reasons, since we are agile tool vendors ourselves. I was going to post a comment, but it became a whole post by itself.

In it he says (italics mine)

I keep on seeing announcements for the next great Agile Task Tracking tool. I just saw one posted to Scrum Development where it’s author said: “I haven’t done much testing, so if you find a bug and want me to fix it let me
know ”.

My reply: Congrats I’m sure you have an excellent application. I’m wondering if you see the irony – you’re posting to an Agile group and say that your app has hardly been tested? What is your definition of Done? Do you use TDD? At least Unit Testing? What was your approach to acceptance testing?

The implied message here is that releasing an app un-tested is un-agile. I disagree.

Continue reading ‘When Should You Release Before You Test?’ »