Agile

Managing technical debt is essential for any organization relying heavily on software. So why isn’t it a “no-brainer” to modernize?

Since the Agile methodology was originally created (back in the early 2000’s) some things have changed. Every team does Agile just a little different from one another. Here we outline the core principles that support our entire Agile approach.

There are countless articles and blogs around the topic of Product Owner, but considering its contemporary nature, there is also a lot of confusion around who and what a Product professional really is. In a sea of opinions, the sake of this note is to summarize why MercuryWorks champions the Product role.

Sometimes software systems are just too large for a single team with the generally-accepted “7 plus or minus 2” size to handle.

Feature flags are a powerful tool with many uses, they should be thoughtfully considered as a development tool. Feature Flags allow developers to achieve continuous deployment and clients see great value in the speed at which issues can be resolved.

The Agile development methodology was formalized in 2001 and has become the leading process for software creation. Developers love the flexibility it gives by not requiring that everything be figured out up-front. But as a client, how can you feel comfortable signing a contract without already knowing exactly what you will get?

The rising demand for getting a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) to the market as quickly as possible has highlighted the criticality of Validated Learning within the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC.) Throughout the remainder of this blog post, we’re going to apply 2 of the 5 principles in Eric Ries’ book “The Lean Startup”: (1) Validated Learning and (2) Build-Measure-Learn. Let’s consider our first scenario.

Having well written user stories, with acceptance criteria, is directly correlated to a project running smoothly. Learn our best practices for writing good user stories in this post!

In the last post, I described the three main pillars of ALM: Visibility, Traceability and Automation. This post will describe in more detail the systems and processes you can put in place to build these pillars and improve your chances of success.

Scrum can be a great approach to software development, however the focus of this article will not be on the many benefits of Scrum. Instead, let’s talk about what it takes to get there. Beyond the mechanics of sprints, backlogs, stories, and tasks there is a much harder to account for requirement for Scrum. Trust. Trust between team members is an absolute necessity. Without trust, scrum can quickly turn into one headache after another.