Innovation + Product Development

I joined a conference call this morning and was quite happy because I understood much more of what my U.S. colleague was saying than I have on other calls. One of my Chinese colleagues recorded the meeting so that we can play it back to avoid missing any important points. When I listened to this […]

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 […]

I ran across a great article today titled How to be Productive: Stop Working. Our industry at large seems to have a difficult time with this concept, and something I frequently encounter when talking with people about agile is the misconception that agile requires that teams work only 40 hours per week. How are these […]

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 […]

I recently read an article by CIO Magazine about what can “safely go offshore.” I found the list fascinating, but I’m wondering what you might add to this list based on your experiences? Or, the way author Mathias Thurman puts it: “what I would be comfortable with outsourcing and what I would never want to […]

As an interviewer using Pair Programming when interviewing potential candidates, apart from the warm-up chatting what’s the first formal question you will ask and what kind of reply are you expecting? I want to share my opinion. Several years ago I read a book written by Weinberg [1986], which lists three main obstacles to innovation: […]

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 frequently use IM as an online tool for communication, so I have a lot of chance to talk with colleagues from both China and America via IM. To save time, we use a lot of abbreviations when chatting. For example, we all know the meaning of “c u”, which is popular in both China […]

To better understand the article, it’ll be great if you have some basic idea about sellenium and tellurium. As quoted from Tellurium website: The Tellurium Automated Testing Framework (Tellurium) is a UI module-based automated testing framework for web applications. The UI module is a collection of UI elements you group together. Usually, the UI module […]

Many companies are bringing outsourced IT in-house. Should you? Bringing IT in house can be complex and costly. Think about these costs: Termination fees, facility build-outs, shared assets, application migration, personnel training and transitions, new hiring, and software license transfers, to name a few. Here are nine questions that CIO.com suggests you ask yourself before […]

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 […]