SCRUM is a great way to manage all sorts of tasks including sprints, but you don’t have to purchase expensive software packages to burn one. Excel is a great tool for rolling your own sprint burn down graph or you can just take mine. In this article, I’ll walk you through a burn down spreadsheet I created, show you how to modify it and at the end you can download it for yourself and kick the tires.

This is a popular story which illustrates the advantages of not just plowing away at your work, but improving your knowledge, planning, skills and preparation first to achieve a better outcome in the end

Once upon a time there were two men who lived in the same forest and decided to have a contest chopping wood.  The first man was in good physical shape and very muscular.  The second man was in good shape but smaller in statute and wiry.  They would chop wood all day and at the end of the day compare to see who had chopped the most wood.  The first man laughed to himself that there was no way this wiry little man would beat him and so they began the contest.  Every 45 minutes the second smaller man would take a break and seems to just wonder off somewhere.  The first man laughed again to himself and said “Yep there’s no way this wiry little man is going to beat me.”  This happens several times during the day.  At the end of the day the two men compare their piles of chopped wood and unbelievably enough the wiry little man has chopped twice as much wood as the more physically fit man.  He says “I don’t understand.  First I’m twice your size and twice your strength!  On top of that every 45 minutes you rolled off and took a break or a nap or something.  You must have cheated!”  The smaller man says “I didn’t cheat.  It was easy to beat you because every 45 minutes when you thought I was taking a break, I was out back sharpening my ax.” ¹

I looked around for a good performance review template for a long time but I finally just sat down and wrote my own. It is a 5 pt system with various categories that cover

• hard skills – your skill at your core competency i.e testing
• soft skills (quality, follower ship, communication, proactivity, intangibles)
• Performance – how you are doing, productivity
• Quality
• Trend – getting better, worse or the same

When I was in the Army we all got a 2 page hard copy with a visual called “Rubber balls vs glass balls” as an analogy for balancing the many day to day priorities of being an Officer. It was a compelling article that I’ve referred back to many times in life. I’ve spent the last couple years looking for it on the web, but with no luck here is my attempt to recreate it from scratch, by memory.

In today’s world of DevOps and ALM practices, there is often a strong emphasis on the visibility and traceability of the work we perform towards software development. This means that as developers, we often have to account (to clients, business owners, project teams etc.) for a list of development tasks that will be undertaken to deliver a given project requirement or user story. Amidst several tools that can be used to facilitate such a practice, Team Foundation Server (TFS) is one such tool that can be used by developers to keep track of their work items.