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.
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
Back in August I wrote a post called “How do you know when you’re done?” in which I explored the agile concept of the “definition of done” or “done done”. However, in conversations with developers over the last few…
Over the last couple of months we’ve had a number of requests from people and projects, somewhat out of the blue, asking for pieces of work to be completed with a deadline within only a couple of days of asking. We…
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…
How do you know when you've completed something? Agile invites you to define "done done" so everyone on the team knows.
This guide shows how the 60/20/20 proportion of must, should and could requirements in Agile MoSCoW prioritisation is against effort not number of requirements.