Itteco Corp

Lessons learned

• How to write good emails
  I’d like to share with you a good practice about how to write emails and do not spend a lot of time for this task. The most important is that you need to understand what action you would like to have from the recipient; Try to summarize all his potential questions and write shortly one paragraph explanation [...] […]
  Pavel Kartautsau
• “Done” = “I am proud of it”
  ‘’Done means DONE” is the fundamental assumption of all agile software development methods. Agile does not address the need for re-work or repair orders, assuming it is close to 0. I believe, Definition of Done (DoD) is one of the greatest challenges for agile teams and one of the most often reasons agile teams fail. There are [...] […]
  Ivan Paramonau
• Product Owner has to stay focused and think ahead (confession of failure)
  Ok, it’s time I put my product owner hat on and confess. Confess in recent failure. So we have just finished the sprint of our community site project. The scope was to develop the groups functionality and expand it to projects and teams. The base group functionality should include forums, administration of groups and all the rest [...] […]
  Ivan Paramonau
• #leanstartup intro
  The Lean Startup concept by Eric Ries is taking off and getting some serious traction. I first stumbled upon it a year ago or so, and found many of the principles very useful for most startups I worked with ever after, including our own. Here is some great intro into the concept: 2009 11 09 The Lean Startup [...] […]
  Ivan Paramonau
• Lean Software Development
  Scrum is fast and controllable, but sometimes such a speed is not enough… As you know, until the software or set of requirements has been deployed to the production environment it passes several stages: 1. Analysis 2. Development 3. Testing, bug-fixing and integration 4. Deployment to production It could [...] […]
  Pavel Kartautsau
• Stay Lean 2: minimize waste, shorten lead time
  A while ago, I put up a praise for staying lean. This week, I stumbled about surprisingly clear guidelines on how to transform to being lean in 12 steps by Stephan Schmidt (Grab the eBook now, it won’t last, I assume). Among the must-have and priority steps for us, I would take the following: Increase quality (which [...] […]
  Ivan Paramonau
• Be prepared. Think ahead.
  This is the attempt to define the difference between ‘What to do’ and ‘How to do’. I am putting my Product Owner’s hat to try to tackle it and step back from the implementation issues. Be prepared The lessons I keep learning from almost every project is ‘Be prepared’. It means that, in most cases, the velocity [...] […]
  Ivan Paramonau
• Pig & Chicken: “How to contribute without being over committed?” OR “Oh, poor middleman!”
  The well-known The Chicken and The Pig story is used with reference to Scrum more often than with reference of anything else, I believe. Despite its wide perception of just being a silly story, the metaphor makes lots of sense in various aspects of software development. As Michael Vizdos mentioned, you can’t be Pig & [...] […]
  Ivan Paramonau
• Long story short: Fixed price & Agile
  Long story The “Fixed Price in Agile Projects” tale is long enough. There are multiple views, which all dance around unbinding Price/Time-Scope-Quality triangle as agile projects are much less predictable in conventional sense (“conventional” meaning delivery of the predefined scope within predefined period time, whereas agile approach sets another conventi […]
  Ivan Paramonau