Developer Stories

A Kanban Board is part of the lean management or in our case the lean software idea. Lean software states seven principles, where a Kanban board is a tool supporting mainly the first two principle: visualise your workflow and provide regulary feedback . Jira Software has a Kanban board included, but if you are a developer and not trained with the ideas behind it, you will probably not use it very effectively. Visualise your workflow does not mean painting nice images of what you are doing. Instead it is targeted to optimize the flow by reducing your cycle time (thr number of days an issue takes from creation to being closed). A Kanban board solves these typical problems: How long take my stories in average to be available to my customers? How can I use this data to make a prediction, when something showable is ready? Where in my process does not happen anything with my issues? Where do I loose time? Identify and resolve process and resource bottlenecks: Which column i...

  Introduction This text tries to give an introduction to time management. Since I work as a developer my examples are taken from IT work. In the first part, classical time management — based on the  Getting Things Done  process — is discussed. I am strongly influenced by the  Getting Things Done  process, which has many well thought-out ideas (but can overwhelm for beginners). The text should be read by people who have little to no experience with time management so far and is intended to give them an introduction. How work arrives My past work   includes development, QA, project management and architecture. The job is exciting and you can rarely complain about boredom —to say “no” is not always an option. Typical tasks include: Work with source code Writing documentation Analyse problems or change requests Gather requirements Sit in meetings or workshops Reading emails and do phone calls Doing interruption requests from your manager Business trips Develop...