All About Agile

April 14th, 2016

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Story Preparation...
Here at RDT we use scrum as our project management framework. Our teams work in two-week sprint cycles in which they have a number of key meetings. Let’s take a closer look at some of these key meetings.

postit

We create “user stories” to represent our clients’ needs. This helps us focus on the target users and what they’ll need, and the value that will be achieved by delivering the particular tranche of work we’re about to start on. Product owners are the link between our development team and our clients, and they work with the clients to find out what they need, either on a one-to-one basis or through workshops, depending on the scale of what’s needed.

During the “story preparation” meeting the product owner takes what they’ve learned from the client to the team for discussion and analysis. The team will ask a number of questions to help understand how they are going to solve the user story. The ideal outcome of this meeting is that the team gets a clear picture of the client’s needs – referred to as “a well understood requirement”, that they will already have some design ideas for that can be taken to the sprint planning meeting. However if the requirement is not well understood we may have to go back to our client for further discussions.

The teams need a regular flow of work and so the process of story preparation is continual. Once we have agreed user stories, these form part of a prioritised product backlog.

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Strategic Claims Conference 2016

Feb 24th, 2016

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Don’t let tomorrow’s problems catch up with you...
At RDT we aim to keep abreast of all the issues the insurance industry faces today. We do this by keeping up with what’s in the press, talking to industry experts and attending conferences. That’s why a group of us will be at the Strategic Claims conference in London on March 3. Going to events like this helps us understand the issues that you, our clients, face. It means that we can better assist you by developing software that is tailored to suit your needs, and resolve the issues that you have faced in the past.

If any of you are attending this event please come to see us at our stand there, it would be great to see you.

www.the-insurance-network.co.uk/event/strategic-claims-conference-2016

Strat-Claim

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RDT Company Video

Feb 18th, 2016

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Check out our new company video...
...to find out a bit more about RDT, our fantastic people, and what makes them tick.


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Understanding Agile - Story Points

Jan 15th, 2016

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Teams use story points to forecast when work will be ready. Let’s take a closer look at what they are...
Story points are the way our teams forecast the time it takes to complete work. It is a measure of relativity rather than a direct correlation to a number of man days, but it does consider the effort involved in the work. We use a variation of the Fibonacci sequence (1,2,3,5,8,13,20,40,100) to give us a numbering system.

FIBONACCI

We then work out roughly how many story points a team can complete within a set time, and we call this the velocity. Using the velocity and the number of story points in a project, we can forecast a date that the work will be completed on. The product owner then tracks this on a burn down chart.

Velocity is variable depending on holidays, sick leave and the number of members in a team, but we have a good sample of data to be able to model patterns. Story points can be confusing as many people try to convert them to a number of days, but that’s not their purpose.

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