Search by author: Gareth Saunders

Gareth is the web architect within the University of St Andrews digital communications team. A graduate of St Andrews (BD Hons, 1993), Gareth joined the web team in 2006 and worked mainly on information architecture and front-end development (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript). He currently spends most of his time doing DSDM agile project management and business analysis.

Gareth Saunders
Sprint planning document for sprint 62 Elmo on my desk

Meet our sprint planning document

Let’s say you have a team of eleven knowledge workers, who have a wide portfolio of responsibilities, and you need to get a bunch of tasks done, across multiple projects, within a two-week window. How would you keep…

Why CSA Outbound will not be in the new style

In October we launched the inbound students hub as the first step towards creating a new Collaborations and Study Abroad (CSA) website. This week we are planning to launch the rest of the Collaborations and Study…

Example Trello kanban board

How and why we QA

At a conference recently one of our team was speaking about how we organise our work using Trello and the Kanban-style workflow we have settled on. A number of people told her afterwards that they were impressed with…

Four Post-it note pads with Must, Should, Could and Won't written on them.

MoSCoW planning poker

Backlog refinement One agile practice that we’ve adopted from Scrum is that of product backlog refinement. In short, it involves representatives from both the project level team (project manager, business visionary,…

The word URL in a clamp

New URL shortening service

Something we’ve talked about for years is creating our own URL shortening service. A couple of months ago Duncan and I sat down one Friday afternoon and created a very basic one using only household objects. What URL…

Books on Agile and Scrum

Seven of my favourite books on Agile

I first encountered Agile at the Scotland on Rails conference in Edinburgh in early 2008. While much of the conference (about Ruby on Rails, a server-side web application framework written in Ruby) went sailing over my…