Author Archive

Risk Management in Small Teams

I was taught risk management the classic way. You know, risk log, voting for probability and impact, finding out which risks are the most painful, deciding on mitigation plan, discussing results etc.

A cool thing in this old-school process is that it activates different members of the team. Even those, who wouldn’t be asked otherwise. Even those, who would tell you that the project is doomed unless you decide to do something about that performance issue found last month.

At the same time in small teams this kind of process looks like complete overkill. In small teams   (more…)

2010-06-11 11:05:24 | Pawel Brodzinski | Others | 3 Comments »

Why We Don’t Write User Stories Anymore

There was a time when we were writing user stories to describe requirements. I’d say they worked fairly well for us. But we don’t do this anymore.

We were using user stories as a technique which allowed us to describe bigger chunks of functionality. There was one bigger sub-project or module and it had more than 10 user stories attached (usually closer to 20) and a handful of non-functional requirements. During development we were often going through several stories at once as technical design didn’t map directly to the stories.   (more…)

2010-04-08 14:39:13 | Pawel Brodzinski | Software Development, Web Development | 1 Comment »