Wayne Allen's Blog

Here is one of the XP2006 workshop antipatterns the group worked on. Poor solution: Acceptance testing is either not done or done at the end Forces: Excessive belief in unit testing No testers involved Insufficient awareness of how to “agilize”… more »

Here is one of the XP2006 workshop antipatterns the group worked on. Poor solution: Unable to take responsibility Cannot say no to developers/stakeholders Forces: Authority problems Inappropriate personality in key role Unclear roles/decision… more »

Here is one of the XP2006 workshop antipatterns the group worked on. Poor solution: Manager prioritizes stories, tells how to do them, developers don’t have a say (because of manager’s authority) Forces: Customer absent Managers want to stay in… more »

Here is one of the XP2006 workshop antipatterns the group worked on. Poor solution: Not switching pairs Forces: High productivity of pair Pair is happy “never change a winning team” Inability to pair with others Consequences: Pair does not… more »

Here is one of the XP2006 workshop antipatterns the group worked on. Poor solution: Individuals volunteer to refactor for the team Forces: Trying to take responsibility on behalf of the team Some people do not refactor enough Some people are af… more »

Here is one of the XP2006 workshop antipatterns the group worked on. Poor Solution: Concurrent work on to many stories None of the stories are done at the end of the iteration. All stories are in progress. Forces: Desire to go as fast as possib… more »

Here is the description of the workshop I ran at XP2006: Agile methodologies are just as prone to mistakes, deviations and subversion as any other methodology. This workshop is intended to discover and share agile process anti-patterns then discuss a… more »

One of the things that often happens when the product owner is technically savvy is that they start writing solution stories. That is they specify how something should be done technically rather than what should be done. For example here is a sto… more »

A common smell that is often detected in teams trying to become more agile is more and more stories/backlog items incomplete at the end of the iteration. There are a couple of different reasons this might happen, but the one I'm interested in today… more »

I've been quiet recently, but busy. Last spring I moved from the consulting world back into "regular" employment where I manage a couple of product teams and internally consult on iterative software development and agile approaches. Since starting here I… more »