Thanks to Alexander Lutsaevsky for the translation. [click to continue…]

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Thanks to Jean-Jacques Lévesque, my “How to Split a User Story” poster is now available in French. [click to continue…]

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Functional Managers in Agile

November 19, 2012

As an organization transforms to an agile way of working, functional managers (e.g. a dev manager or a test manager) can feel lost. Many of their traditional responsibilities move to other roles or disappear altogether. How can functional managers continue to add value in an agile organization? Here are a few ideas…

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Splitting Stories in German (or, User Stories Aufteilen)

August 24, 2012

Thanks to translation from Kai Simons, my “How to Split a User Story” flowchart is now available in German.

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New Story Splitting Resource

January 27, 2012

More than two years after I originally published it, “Patterns for Splitting User Stories” remains one of the most visited posts on my blog. Splitting user stories continues to be one of the areas where the teams I work with most often need coaching. To support the teams I coach, I’ve created a flow chart [...]

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Coaching Surgeons, Cyclists, and Software Teams

January 11, 2012

Atul Gawande is a surgeon and author who has written some excellent books and New Yorker articles reflecting on the state of modern medicine. Recently, his writing has gone beyond medicine in interesting ways. As he looks for lessons for medicine from other disciplines, he ends up with things to teach both medical professionals and [...]

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Cucumber Tip: IRB From Inside a Step Definition

December 7, 2011

Most Ruby programmers know about Ruby’s interactive console, IRB. (If you don’t, stop right here, open up a command window and run irb. Type some Ruby code. See how it returns the result of each line right away.) IRB is great for poking around with unfamiliar libraries. Suppose you’re using Capybara with Cucumber for the [...]

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Building a Useful Task Board

November 21, 2011

The task board is a simple, yet powerful, tool for Scrum teams. As a coach, I can tell a lot about a team just by looking at their task board in the middle of a sprint. If your Scrum team is in the same location, I can’t think of a good reason why you wouldn’t [...]

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Cucumber Tip: Key-Value Tables

October 27, 2011

You may not realize this: Tables in Cucumber steps don’t have to have a header row. Sometimes it can work really well to use a headerless table of key-value pairs. Let’s look at an example. Suppose we have a scenario that fills out an advanced search form to search for medical providers matching certain criteria. [...]

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The Future of Cucumber on .NET

October 21, 2011

Beginning just over two years ago, I worked with some great developers to create Cuke4Nuke as a way to bring Cucumber to .NET. Shortly after the first releases of Cuke4Nuke, TechTalk released SpecFlow, a native .NET tool inspired by Cucumber. As a pure .NET solution without Ruby dependencies, SpecFlow seemed to be easier for Microsoft [...]

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