Suhit Anantula's Public Library

I’ve written in a couple of places about how I like to use a task board during Scrum sprints (iterations). The task board shows all the work we’re doing during a sprint. We update it continuously throughout the sprint–if someone thinks of a new task (“Test the snark code on Solaris 8”) she writes a new card and puts it on the wall. Either during or before the daily scrum, estimates are changed (up or down) and cards are moved around the board.

  

Generically, the task board looks like this:

  

A generic task board. Click to enlarge.

he problem is that burndown charts lack two essential pieces of information. First, how much work was actually accomplished during a given iteration (as opposed to how much work remains to be completed) and second how much total work the project contains (or if you prefer how much scope has increased each iteration). A burnup chart for the exact project above might look like this:

 

 

We can now clearly see that the team did not take a breather in iteration six. They continued to complete about ten points per iteration, but during the sixth iteration the scope increased by about twenty points.

 

One could imagine the opposite happening as well. Later in the project the team might delete old user stories that were envisioned during project inception and thus decrease the total scope. The burndown chart would incorrectly show such a scenario as a sudden increase in velocity.

 

The burndown charts shown here are release charts, where each data point captures the points remaining at the end of each iteration for an entire release. I agree that burnup charts are useful for tracking progress across the release, but I don't think they are appropriate for tracking progress within an iteration (or Sprint, in Scrum terms).

  

Iteration burndowns are ideal for providing daily feedback to the team for the purpose of deciding whether to reduce scope, add scope, or abandon the iteration entirely. In Scrum, success of the iteration is of utmost importance; the entire Scrum process relies on regular, predicable, and demo-able results at the end of each fixed-length iteration.

  

So don't throw away those iteration burndowns!

To solve this dilemma of quantitative versus qualitative measurement, about 20 years ago we started a project to develop an interview technique that combines the strengths of both forms of measurement. We aimed for a method that was able to get full access to a person’s unconscious valuations and was then capable of mathematically combining this individual data into a common picture that merited the name of ‘collective intuition’. Our nextexpertizer computer-based interview tool is the result of all these endeavours.

The measurement of collective intuition is a very promising alternative for understanding the actual behaviour and predicting the future behaviour of customers, citizens and other persons involved in complex cultural order formation processes. As our studies show: you can be years ahead.

twst.com/notes/articles/abu506.html

f investors simply are boosting ownership of emerging-markets stocks from very low levels, that's a good thing, investment strategists say. As emerging nations become more affluent, their stocks will move more independently of markets elsewhere.

 

But there's a potential downside. "Our concern is that when you have this much money moving this quickly, there are growing risks of asset bubbles," says S&P international-equity strategist Alec Young.

'Good service design is the process of deliberately crafting our experience and delivery of services, to make them more valuable for the people that use and provide them.'