Archivos de Autor: Antonio Martel

I remember when I read the book “Prioritizing the Product Backlog” by Roman Pichler. He wrote: “I’ll never forget the day when I suggested to the product manager of a new health-care product to prioritize the use case pile in front of her. She looked at me, her eyes widening, and replied, ‘I can’t. They are all high-priority’”.

Quoting to Karen Martin: “When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority”. I have faced this issue too. I tried to solve it by telling the manager that the team couldn’t be working on five tasks at the same time and asked her what she wanted to obtain first. She didn’t hesitate a second and pointed to one of the user stories. “No doubt,” she said, “this one, definitively”.

Have you ever wondered why Agile is so widely adopted? How does it help companies to deliver sooner and better? Here are some tips:

• Releasing frequently improves customer satisfaction and allows the client to decide how the product is evolving.
• Sprints are small milestones. They help you to overcome the Parkinson laws and avoid feared deadlines at the end of the project, when little can be done if something went wrong.
• The Kanban board, the backlog and the sprint backlog make visible the pending work and how we progress (have a look at the Checklist Effect by Atul Gawande).

I have recently read the article «Deadline Driven Development» from Simón Muñoz. Quite a captivating one.
As in TDD, we create tests before developing the solution, he suggests setting a deadline before estimating, and then doing only what can be done until that deadline.
There are multiple perks to that approach: product managers avoid scope creep, and adding unnecessary features to the product being built. Other than that, developers will reduce the overengineering or creating too complex solutions, far beyond what is needed.
We will be reducing waste by building applications or services with just the two or three most important uses cases . Then, we can release our service, and see what was useful, what our clients require now, when they can use the product. From that point we can make more informed decisions on investing more, and better (or to cancel the product).

See the link to the original blog post (in Spanish): Deadline Driven Development by Simón Muñoz.