Project Management | Read the latest blogs, news and views from Infomentum.

As a project manager, I often have multiple projects running parallel to one another. Before building a solid approach to monitor all these tasks and activities in progress, I always worried I might miss something.

I often felt a step behind my team at the start of new projects implementing system integration. Such projects are very technical and could be overwhelming for a Project Manager like me. I was drowning in tech details and scary-sounding abbreviations.

What is your favourite part of an IT project?

Mine has always been writing user stories. It is when all the ideas take shape and begin their journey to a shiny new product. I know that not everybody feels the same way. I understand why, especially when it comes to writing User Stories for back-end systems, for example, APIs, as these can be particularly challenging.

Successful software delivery is based on careful planning, accurate estimation and a good understanding of what is in and out of scope. In traditional project management, projects are broken into work packages and assigned to specialists for sizing and estimation. These packages are in turn broken up into progressively smaller modules to get increasingly more accurate sizing. After that, all the sizings are rolled up, and a project plan is reviewed and monitored.

Not all user stories are equal. Some may be larger and more complicated than others. The challenge in agile delivery is to keep stories at the right size. That way, they are easily understood and delivered. Those that are too large pose a risk. Wherever possible, you should break them down into smaller, more manageable pieces. In this blog, I will explore factors that might lead to user stories being too 'large'?

In my last article, The evolution of test documentation; lessons learned from implementing Cucumber, I explained two things. Firstly, how we at Infomentum have adopted Behaviour-Driven Development to define test scenarios, and secondly, how we use Cucumber JVM as an implementation platform for running these scenarios as automated tests.

I’ve wanted to write something about Infomentum's scrum board since its inception in late 2012. Now seemed as good a time as any to share the story...

During an end of sprint retrospective, one of our developers Jakub said “I'm bored of the board.” That didn’t surprise me.