Experimentation is a powerful learning tool. When I was young, I performed scientific experiments by mixing chemicals together to see what they would do. I learned that most random concoctions from my chemistry set would make a brown liquid that was often hard to clean out of a test tube. I learned that sometimes they would create very smelly brown liquids. These were not really experiments, however, and I didn’t really learn from them. Instead, these were activities and I collected anecdotes and experiences from them.

The scientific method rests on the performance of experiments to confirm or deny a proposed hypothesis. Unless you can propose a hypothesis in advance, you cannot design an experiment to test it. Until you test the hypothesis, you haven’t really learned anything. Read More

I’m working with a client that has multiple, non-collocated component teams working on one project. It’s not my ideal situation, but we’re making the best we can of the situation.

We built a story map of business-oriented, project-level “epics.” These have been prioritized within business themes, and have been tentatively scheduled for development releases. The early ones have been estimated with level of effort (LOE). Basically these LOEs are Small, Medium, and Large, but given numeric scores to allow tracking project progress toward development releases from a business point of view using a burnup chart. Read More