Innovation + Product Development

Recently I was asked about ‘starter metrics’ for projects (both multi-shore and single shore) looking to transition to a much more objective measure of delivery team performance. Here are the first tier metrics that I would recommend as a good starting point. There is a lot more detail in the webinar and associated white-paper on […]

As found, there are some concenpts in the automated testing may be confusing. This is especially true when people have the experience of working for several companies. Therefore, I’d like to spend couple minutes to make following concepts clear. Test harness Test framework Test runner If you google image using the keyword “horse harness“, you’ll […]

Robert Martin wrote an article in November, 2010 entitled “What killed water fall could kill Agile” Martin wrote about the elitism in software development. In water fall, the analysts are elites; they define everything in documentation and leave the work to the developer. When a project fails, it is the developer who bares the blame. […]

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 […]

In observing an interview practice for pair programming for job interviews, I saw and enjoyed a really wonderful process between two of my respected colleagues. They discussed, argued and bargained from the start, and they soon made compromises and began to work. During the coding stage they discussed and overcame every unintended problem they met; […]

2010 Agile tour Hangzhou, Jeff Xiong shared an agile story of two teams in different city, we called it ‘a tale of two cities’. The two teams work very hard, always overtime, but the output is not proportional with what they have paid. The client is unhappy, team always get blamed. They had to ask […]

What is the essence of Lean thinking? Usually people might think of terms such as Kanban, pull, waste reduction, queue management, and other lean tools. Recently I read the article “Lean Primer” (authored by Crag Larman and Bas Vodde). The authors made it clear that this is a profound miss-understanding of Lean. They note: ” […]

A while back I posted “Establishing a Successful Support Arrangement – 4 Key Process Steps” This really was intended to be just the tip of the iceberg with regard to this topic. On Thursday, December 16th – I’m going to be presenting a webinar that dives a little deeper into these waters. During this hour […]

Perficient’s China Global Delivery Center was established in 2004 and is located in Hangzhou, China. As an employee of this company for more than three years and a citizen in Hangzhou, I am more than proud to introduce this wonderful city to you – the best business and tourism city in China.

As my colleagues and I have described in other posts, Perficient China has been a pioneer in areas of CMMI and agile. We were the first CMMI Level 5 appraised company in Zhejiang province, and perhaps the only company in China to be assessed at this level using an agile approach to project delivery. A common […]

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 read the book “Agile Project Management with Scrum”  recently, there are some quotation I think is good to share. If you also have good one, please share with us. 1. ScrumMaster like a sheepdog, responsible for keeping the flock together and the wolves away. 2. A Scrum project is controlled by means of frequency […]