develpreneur podcast
Posted on The Agile Manifesto

Using The Sprint Retrospective For Agile Improvement

The sprint retrospective is where we take the time to assess how we did and plan for improvement.  It is essential for getting better.  Unfortunately, running this activity can be challenging and easy to underestimate for its value.  Here are some suggestions for converting the time spent in a retrospective into action items for improvement. Initial Challenges All teams start out working on how they communicate.  That is just the nature of being human beings.  It is not different in the professional world.  We have processes to clarify and terminology to agree upon.  That means an early sprint retrospective will likely have this “low hanging fruit” to address.  These items may seem trivial or surprising for an experienced team.  However,... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on The Agile Manifesto

Sprint Planning – Setting The Scope

We have set a goal of delivering working software as part of every sprint.  That requires sprint planning and deciding on what will be in or out of scope.  In this episode, we look at ways to craft a sprint and assist us in setting priorities and content.  The ultimate goal is to provide working software that satisfies the customer. The First Step When we start a project, there will often be an overwhelming amount of tasks in the backlog.  We will need to go through several sprints to reduce that long list of items.  Our goal is working software along the way so consider crafting a story for each sprint.  This will provide a way to tie together the... Read more

django models and admin tools
Posted on Python-Django Crash Course

Django Models and Administration Features

Django gives us a robust set of tools for our database and administration of our application.  This tutorial provides an introduction to Django models and those tools.  We will look at how to create and modify our application database and configure security quickly. Django Models Our tour of Django begins with the models and how they make it easy to create a database and maintain them.  The definition of a table is relatively easy to learn, and we get a command-line option for migrating changes to our DB.  That eliminates one of the common challenges to modern development which is, tracking changes to the database.  We can craft build scripts and version control those.  However, Django automates those change scripts... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on The Agile Manifesto

Sprint Grooming – Deciding on the Included Tasks

Several sub-tasks are needed for proper sprint grooming.  They are essential steps in crafting a sprint plan.  These tasks are not trivial and include such on-going difficulties as estimating the time or effort required.  In this episode, we will look closer at these essential activities. Estimating Effort There is no end to the content available to assist us in estimating effort.  However, there is also no silver bullet that allows us to guarantee proper estimation.  That is not a blocking issue.  We will get better at estimating as we do it more often.  Perfection is not needed.  We do want to be as consistent as possible and be able to get close to our estimates.  This task is not for... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on The Agile Manifesto

Scrum Ceremonies – Running An Effective Sprint

We have already touched on the scrum ceremonies.  However, the way we perform each ceremony goes a long way towards embracing the Scrum process.  Let’s take each item individually and examine how we can make the most of them.  These are investments in building a better sprint team.  They come from the Agile principles, and it is important we keep that in mind for each activity. The Daily Standup This task is the most popular of scrum ceremonies in my experience.  However, it is often misused.  A well-run standup should be so short it is not worth the time to sit down for the meeting.  A good goal is less than fifteen minutes.  That may seem brief for a meeting. ... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on The Agile Manifesto

The Sprint Process – An Agile Approach

The sprint process is a popular way to implement the Agile approach to software development.  Is has its detractors.  However, there are many ways that this approach can split up a large project into smaller bites.  This action of breaking something big into manageable pieces increases the chances of success.  Also, a sprint helps us address numerous principles discussed in the Agile Manifesto. Deliver Working Software A challenging part of the sprint process is the goal of delivering working software as part of completing each sprint.  We are not ignoring the SDLC steps.  Those six steps are being repeated each sprint and require a little creative thinking. Working software is not the same as useful.  We can build a solution... Read more