Technology weblog

Certified Scrum Master

This week I became Certified Scrum Master by attending the training given by Paul Goddard.

Paul turned out to be an excellent trainer as well as a skilled drawing artist:

Posted at 11:43AM Jun 04, 2011 by Zeger Hendrikse in Scrum & Agile  |  Comments[0]

Incrementing versus iterating

A big pitfall (and hence risk) in many Agile projects is that the team tries to incrementally deliver perfect features at the end of every increment (sprint in Scrum jargon). Of course, this will almost always lead to disappointments, as the product owner most of the time does not have a crystal clear picture of his requirement (user story) from the start, let alone that the team has enough time and information to realize it.

Incrementing would ideally imply the delivery of perfectly implemented features at the end of each increment.

Iterating means that most of the user stories are iterated over multiple iterations, eventually reaching "perfection":

Iterating asserts that the product can be taken into production at an early stage and that the product owner has the choice to pay for the "glossiness" in the last iterations.

Acknowledgements: The above pictures have been taken from this presentation.

Posted at 04:41PM Sep 16, 2010 by Zeger Hendrikse in Scrum & Agile  |  Comments[3]

Unit tests rendered useless

In this post I will argue why test coverage obtained from functional tests leads to associated metrics from which genuine conclusions can be drawn, as opposed to the much more commonly accepted view that useful test coverage related metrics can be obtained from mere unit tests. Moreover

• Functional tests render most mocking frameworks redundant.
  
• Line coverage of 95% should be feasible without too much efforts.
  
• This approach is seamlessly applied to agile development techniques.
  

Posted at 04:04PM Sep 03, 2010 by Zeger Hendrikse in Scrum & Agile  |  Comments[1]