Agile

Agile distributed team – using chat to run scrum meetings

Posted on by Ivan Kuznetsov

The current development team that I’m working in is really small – just 2 software gurus, a product owner and me as a scum-master/system admninistrator/part-time developer/architect.

Our team is distributed to the extent that sometimes all four of us are located in different places during our meetings – but time zones difference is in most of the cases withing 1-2 hours. Up until recently some of us didn’t have a permanent office and had to participate in daily scrum meetings, and sprint planning/reviews from public open spaces. Continue readingAgile distributed team – using chat to run scrum meetings

Adopting an Agile Mindset

Posted on by Ivan Kuznetsov

There are a lot of books written about Agile. One can easily spend hundreds of euros on books and thousands on training courses. Sure, if your organisation has time and money, it makes sense to stockpile books and send entire development team for training courses. From my experience, what it really takes for a team …

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Using Trac for agile project management

Posted on by Ivan Kuznetsov

By now I’ve been using Trac more than two years for managing various projects – from very small ones with just a few people involved (combining in themselves developers, testers and product owners) to large ones with more than 20 people (both in private projects and in Nokia – yes, yes, some Nokia projects are also using Trac).

In agile projects, especially in large organizations, one needs to find the right balance between “post-it management” bordering with chaos and monstrous tools and processes for requirements and defect management and project documentation and reporting. Choosing the right tool can have a significant impact on team performance.

There are multiple commercial tools available for project tracking in agile environment, but I still choose Trac in most of the cases for its openness, simplicity and customizability. Below I explain the reasons for this choice and highlight limitations we faced in large scale projects.

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