Vernon Stinebaker

In an earlier blog post I noted that I like things that just work. To this end one of the User Stories I related to the Library in a Box team was “As a mobile app user I would like the library to be found automatically if the library service is available on the network […]

Sorry, it’s a pun(ny) title. If you haven’t gotten it already, you will soon (ahhh! stop it with the puns already!) My family, colleagues, and people who attend my Scrum training will all attest to my being a big fan of Apple’s products. I appreciate good design and I like things that “just work”. But […]

Docker and custom mobile application development are both very hot. Recently we decided to run a small internal project to gain some ‘sleeves-up’ insight into Docker as well as how we could deliver containerized versions of applications. This blog article, along with others to follow from both my colleagues and myself will document some of […]

Agile values tacit over explicit learning. It’s not that explicit learning isn’t valuable, it is; but it’s the tacit learning — where things become embedded and part of our nature — that is the most valuable. If there were one piece of tacit knowledge that I wish I could transfer (think Vulcan mind meld) it […]

A colleague of mine asked a question on an internal forum today about a web-based Scrum tool. This isn’t an advertisement for any tool, so I’ll not mention the name. (Also, as anyone I’ve trained in Scrum will attest, I recommend a white board and sticky notes as the primary tracking tool whenever possible, even […]

I was drawn into a conversation about fixed priced contracts on LinkedIn. Since many people might not be monitoring the associated group on LinkedIn I thought it might be useful for me to cross post here. The content of my LinkedIn post (slightly edited) follows:

One might ask: “What does baking a cake have to do with project delivery?” Actually the process of baking a cake is a great analogy to help understand a common practice which often results in projects spinning out of control leaving both the team developing the project the project’s clients dissatisfied and disappointed.

In this fourth and final article on agile estimation and planning we’ll look at planning. Part 1 and Part 2 of this series we looked at how relative estimation could help us improve our estimation accuracy. In Part 3 we looked at how team-based estimation further helped us further develop a comprehensive view of the problem being estimated. […]

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, we investigated why we use relative estimation as the foundation for our estimation and planning process. In this article we will look at a second aspect of Agile estimation that helps us improve the accuracy of our estimates. Traditional estimation is an expert estimation technique: that […]

A bit over a year ago I wrote about Demanding Technical Excellence . I’ve also written a bit about our Boot Camp program. We’ve recently just completed our 10th Boot Camp, and I thought I’d share some results. I mention the previous articles because I think the results speak strongly to both of these articles.

In the first article in this series we looked at absolute vs. relative estimation, and using an example saw how we could improve our estimation accuracy by applying relative estimation. In this article we briefly at a second reason we use a relative estimate of effort instead of time to improve our estimates.

This article is the first of a series of that will talk about Agile estimation and planning. There is a great deal of information available in books and online describing Agile estimation techniques. This series of articles attempts to summarize some of the available information based on our practical experience and make it readily assessable […]