Agile
535 bites tagged Agile — interview questions with model answers, and 60-second explainers.
Iterative Design: Build, Test, Learn, Repeat
Iterative design is a cycle of building, testing, and refining based on user feedback. It's standard for app development, where you ship a basic version and improve it with data. The footgun is mistaking any change for iteration; it requires real user testing.
Minimum Marketable Feature (MMF): Ship Value, Not Parts
An MMF is the smallest piece of functionality that provides real value to a customer. Use it to break down large projects into valuable, incremental releases. The footgun is confusing it with an MVP (for learning) or slicing it too thin to be useful alone.
Roadmap Commitment Levels: Now, Next, Later
Agile roadmaps replace fixed timelines with commitment levels: 'Now' (in progress), 'Next' (planned), and 'Later' (potential ideas). This structure communicates decreasing certainty, allowing teams to adapt without breaking promises.
Outcome-Based Roadmaps: Solve Problems, Not Ship Features
An outcome-based roadmap frames work around problems to solve, not a checklist of features to build. It gives teams autonomy to find the best solution for goals like increasing user engagement or improving conversion.
Product Roadmap vs. Backlog: Strategy vs. Tactics
A roadmap is your strategic travel plan showing major destinations (product goals), while the backlog is the turn-by-turn navigation for the current leg of the journey (development tasks). The footgun is cluttering the roadmap with backlog details.
Managing Growth with an Experiment Backlog
An experiment backlog is a prioritized list of testable ideas that turns strategy into action. Agile teams use it to manage projects, using business intelligence to measure performance and ensure ideas deliver value. The footgun is a lack of governance.
Hypothesis-Driven Development: Test Your Ideas Before You Build
Hypothesis-Driven Development treats product work as a series of experiments, not a to-do list. You state a testable belief ("If we build X, users will do Y") before writing code. This de-risks new features by validating ideas early.
Release Trains: Aligning Multiple Agile Teams
A Release Train is a long-lived 'team of teams' (50-125 people) building a large solution together. It aligns multiple Agile teams to a common roadmap, ensuring they deliver value in sync.
Team Topologies: Organizing for a Fast Flow of Value
Team Topologies is an organizational design framework for accelerating value. As teams scale or adopt new tech, complexity often slows them down. This model structures teams to maintain a fast flow of delivery and innovation.
Incremental Build: Develop and Ship Software in Pieces
Incremental builds deliver software in usable chunks, not one big release. This lets you ship value and gather feedback early on large projects. The footgun is poor planning, leading to disconnected features and architectural debt instead of a cohesive…
Lean Portfolio Management (LPM): Connecting Strategy to Execution
LPM connects strategy to execution by applying Lean thinking to funding and governance. It manages a portfolio of development value streams—like an e-commerce site—to ensure work aligns with business goals.
Behavior-Driven Development (BDD): Requirements as Tests
BDD turns requirements into executable tests using a shared, human-readable language. Use it for complex features where business and tech teams need to align. The footgun is writing BDD scenarios *after* coding, missing the collaborative design benefit.
Feature Teams: Ship Value, Not Layers
A feature team owns a customer-facing feature from start to finish, unlike component teams that own a single tech layer. This reduces handoffs and speeds up delivery.
Agile Transformation Backlog: The Roadmap for Change
An Agile Transformation Backlog turns a vague vision for change into a concrete, prioritized to-do list for the entire organization. A dedicated team uses it to roll out new practices to specific departments, one small, measurable change at a time.
Work Item Age: Don't Let Your Tasks Spoil
Think of work item age as the time elapsed since a task started, like food in a fridge with an expiration date. Kanban teams use it to spot delays and bottlenecks. The biggest mistake is tracking age without acting on aging items to unblock them.
Kanban Replenishment: Pulling Work, Not Pushing It
Instead of a manager pushing tasks, a replenishment meeting is where the team pulls work into their active backlog. This cadence refills the 'Ready to Start' column, ensuring a steady flow of well-understood tasks.
A3 Problem Solving: One Page to Clarity
A3 Problem Solving makes your thinking visible, using a single-page report to map the journey from a problem to a solution. It's used to diagnose bugs or strategic issues like falling market share. The footgun is using it when options are already decided.
Sprint Capacity Planning: Committing to Achievable Work
Sprint capacity planning is like checking your team's fuel tank before a road trip. It calculates your team's actual available work hours for a sprint, accounting for time off, to make a realistic commitment.
Kaizen: The Art of Continuous Improvement
Kaizen means "continuous improvement," making small, frequent changes instead of big, risky ones. In Scrum, this is the heart of the Sprint Retrospective, where teams inspect their process and define concrete actions for the next sprint.
Agile Maturity Models: A Map, Not a Race
An Agile Maturity Model is a report card for your process, assessing adherence to Agile values through defined levels. Teams use it to benchmark progress and find weak spots.
Disciplined Agile: A Toolkit, Not a Prescription
Disciplined Agile (DA) is a toolkit, not a rigid framework, for choosing your own process. It helps teams blend practices from Scrum and Lean when one method doesn't fit. The footgun is treating DA as a prescription instead of a decision-making guide.
Cycle Time Scatterplot: Visualize Your Team's Predictability
A Cycle Time Scatterplot visualizes delivery speed by plotting how long each task took against its completion date. Agile teams use it to spot predictability trends and set realistic delivery forecasts.
Cycle Time: Measuring Your 'Time to Value'
Cycle time is the total duration from a feature's conception to its deployment in production. Agile teams track it to speed up feedback loops and value delivery. The main footgun: start and stop times are inconsistent, making cross-team comparisons unreliable.
Service Delivery Review: The Missing Agile Feedback Loop
A Service Delivery Review shifts focus from *what* was built to *how* it was delivered. It's a regular meeting where teams and customers review quantitative metrics like lead time and blockers.
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