Barry Hawkins (Posts about ask-an-agile-coach)

Ask an Agile Coach: What is an Agile Coach?

Barry Hawkins — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 00:15:41 GMT

This installment of the Ask an Agile Coach series is a question normally asked by persons outside my field, but lately I have been asking it myself:

What is an Agile Coach?

Good question. I am not sure anymore.

Ask an Agile Coach: What Team Members can be shared across multiple Scrum teams?

Barry Hawkins — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 17:53:26 GMT

Welcome to another installment of Ask an Agile Coach. Today's question centers around how to structure teams in light of constrained skill sets in an organization:

What technical roles, other than QA, can be successfully shared across scrum teams? DBA, UX, etc.? - @jakejgordon

Strive to have people in dedicated teams; only share in order to get work from concept to customer.

Ask an Agile Coach: Should I count partially complete user stories in my velocity?

Barry Hawkins — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 19:55:25 GMT

Hello readers, apologies for the lack of posts lately; lots of work at hand. Today's Ask an Agile Coach question comes from a comment on the last installment, which is rephrased here. In one form or another, I have gotten this question for years now:

Should I count partially complete user stories in my velocity? For example, if I have a 100-point story that's almost done, should I add 80 points to my delivered points total for this sprint?

The answer is no, you should not.

Ask an Agile Coach: How do I handle the effect of carryover on velocity?

Barry Hawkins — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 22:39:43 GMT

Our previous installment of Ask an Agile Coach had a new question in the comments:

As for the case when some of the user stories didn’t get completed, what happens to the user stories which were partially completed–say, 80% finished–but didn’t quite make it? How do you keep your velocity metric from getting hosed?

Practitioners have asked me variations of these questions many times over the years. I'll paraphrase them into a single question:

How do I handle the effect of carryover on velocity?

Ask an Agile Coach: What do I do with a sprint that ends with only incomplete stories?

Barry Hawkins — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 22:39:37 GMT

Today's Ask an Agile Coach submission comes from Jake Gordon via Twitter:

Anyone (@barryhawkins) have any good articles on reaching the end of an iteration with only partially completed user stories? #agile

What do you do with a sprint that ends with only incomplete stories?

Ask an Agile Coach

Barry Hawkins — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 18:55:22 GMT

I never have a shortage of people with questions about applying Agile in the myriad possible scenarios of software development for business. This ongoing series focuses on answers to those questions.

If you would like your question to be anonymous, please let me know when submitting. I'd recommend email or a Twitter DM since you kind of let everyone know it's your question if you use the other methods of contact. :-)

Have a question? Submit it via Twitter, LinkedIn, or email to barry at barryhawkins dot com. I look forward to answering them here!