Ethan Huang (Hangzhou, China)

I often talk with teams who claim that they’re running Scrum on their software development projects, or, at least they believe they are. “We’re applying all the Scrum ceremonies, fixed duration Sprints, Sprint Planning, Daily Stand-up, Sprint reviews, and Retrospectives”. “The team is using Burndown Charts to track the performance.” “The only issue is that […]

Story Point estimation is a comparison estimation approach, where Story Points are used to represent the relative size for the User Stories. At Perficient when doing Story Point estimation, we select one small User Story which every individual on the team is familiar with and feels comfortable to commit to delivering in a short period […]

Planning poker is a widely accepted estimating technology which is being used in almost all the teams in Perficient GDC. It “combines expert opinion, analogy, and disaggregation into an enjoyable approach to estimating that results in quick but reliable estimates” (Agile Estimating and Planning, Mike Cohn). However, we found that sometimes this poker game takes quite a […]

I’m very lucky because there is a wonderful small restaurant right opposite to my apartment. They sell various noodles that taste great. Actually this restaurant is so famous that it attracts people from different areas of this city. Usually from 10:00 am there is already a long queue waiting for lunch. If you don’t get […]

Recently while cleaning up my photo albums I found some interesting old pictures which were captured while I was leading a Scrum project. These white board pictures illustrate how we incrementally deliver from scratch. Looking at these pictures I really enjoy recollecting the days when I was working together with my team; days we spent […]

Ideally a Scrum team should be protected from any requirement change during a Sprint. But that is IDEAL. Often we face clients who are unable to assign a real Product Owner to the team, and we seldom win the battle of trying to convince our client to add changes to the Product Backlog and prioritize […]

My team recently received a couple of very interesting burndown charts from our previous sprint, and we’ve had a very good discussion on how this happened. We’re feeling this case could be very convincing evidence to support that using Story Points to estimate is better than using actual hours. Before we look at the charts […]

A Burndown chart is the most important tool we use to represent work left over time in our Scrum toolbox. We use this diagram to measure the current progress and assess how healthy the project status is by looking at the trend. It also provides a good way for the team to know the deviation […]

We use Burn Down charts to illustrate our task completion status in the Scrum world. However, if you’re still using hours to estimate your user stories/tasks, are you using the burn down chart in an appropriate way? Is your Burn Down chart really demonstrating your current progress and team velocity?

We’ve been very familiar with the traditional V-model like below: Even when implementing an Agile SDLC, sometimes we still treat this model as an important  guidance to some degree when defining our development/testing activities. We have to admit that the traditional deliverables/documents used to define the product are still widely accepted by senior developers and […]

Everybody knows how important planning and estimation is inside a Scrum development cycle – it helps the Scrum team to communicate and break the User Stories down into measurable pieces; it helps to estimate how much work the team could finish within a short period of time so that team would make commitments that they […]

Last week I was facilitating an interesting conversation between my development team and testing team. The great experience we had on that conversation was how the two teams broke the silos down to secure code quality together at an earlier stage. I related a story that shared how that team made a significant difference in the […]