James King

What you do next matters.

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  • Elaborating user stories by using acceptance tests

    Elaborating stories using acceptance tests involves defining the criteria for stories before turning them into code. This is the approach we often teach in agile courses.

  • An index to some approaches for elaborating stories

    There are many approaches that work well when elaborating stories and the team should decide on the approach that works best for them.

  • Using MoSCoW to prioritize ideas

    I have been on a lot of projects in my time and I used to prioritise ideas or requirements as “high”, “medium” or “low” importance. If people classified their requirement as low,however, we would record the requirement in a long list, thank them for their idea and then never talk about it again.  If they classified it as medium then…

  • Risks in IT Operations – some analysis tools

    Not long ago an airline (Virgin Blue) had a complete meltdown of their ticketing system and just last week a major Australian bank (NAB) had a full on disaster where they couldn’t pay people money they owed for several days. Both were apparently due to failures in IT operations (IT systems and IT processes) and…

  • Learning to teach online:what do you think?

    Someone emailed me today to ask what trends I thought were emerging that us trainer/consultant/wanderers should be taking notice of. Two trends I have been noticing that are both scary and exciting to me are People are making knowledge and ideas available for free.  This blog includes some of my trade secrets in the hope…

  • Agile governance and the problem with measuring self-organising teams

    I have been in some interesting conversations recently about agile development teams and sound organisational governance.  One of the challenges faced by organisations is that the traditional measures used to monitor and control teams are not necessarily suited to the style and approach of agile teams, while agile approaches may seem to remain silent on,…

  • Er .. um … is co-locating a team bad for projects?

    I had a really challenging question in a training course recently.  I normally like these because I get a chance to say “good question, hmm – what do the rest of the group think?”.  Then I sit back and learn from the group. This time the question stumped all of us though so my initial…

  • Risk outrage – look out for falling coconuts

    A participant in a workshop alleged that coconuts are more dangerous in some parts of the world than sharks. Apparently he has seen statistics showing that in the South Pacific there are substantially more deaths related to falling coconuts than shark attacks. So at a typical resort by the beach, people will be worried about sharks when in…

  • Talking about retrospectives on another blog

    I was running a course on “facilitating workshops in agile projects” when some of the crew asked what different questions they could ask in retrospectives (instead of just “what worked and what didn’t). We got talking about the retrospective at the end of a project.  So I published a story of sorts on how to run a…

  • Favourite reading on agile project management

    I thought I would just put up a quick post to point people to my favourite reading on agile and related project management topics.