Tag: Agile

Scrum Ceremonies

Scrum is intended to be an iterative and incremental approach to improving the software development process. There are 3 key scrum ceremonies designed to help facilitate improvements to your process: The “Daily Stand-up” Sprint Planning Sprint Retrospective We first presented these ideas to a room full of Constant Contact developers who engage in Scrum practices […]

Three Amigos to the Rescue

Note: This is the 3rd installment in the Scrum Hacks series. What is Three Amigos? Three Amigos is a collaboration technique used as part of the scrum process to define: what to do how to determine that it’s been done correctly It requires the collaboration of the three primary perspectives in a development team: Business […]

Scaling Agile – Long Term Planning

Some of the big, age old questions around Agile software development are: How do you scale Agile with larger projects and organizations? Do you still have to plan work? How far out? In moving through our Agile journey at Constant Contact, we have found that YES, there are better ways to do planning. Where we […]

How to Create Balance in Your Team with the Help of SCRUM and Taylor Swift

I recently found myself at a Taylor Swift concert. Yes, that’s what happens when you have teenage children. But while listening to her song “Shake It Off,” I couldn’t help but be reminded of the importance of making sure that we shake up our product development environment and culture every once in a while. As […]

Our SCRUM Metrics

Here we are, rolling out SCRUM across our teams, having teams practice the process and deliver customer value.  We needed to figure out a simple way to measure the effectiveness of our rollout.  Measuring the effectiveness has two parts: Part 1 How effective were we in changing team behaviors, making our team members and product […]

SCRUM and RACI

As we have been putting SCRUM into the organization, it has me thinking about how to help the teams understand roles and responsibilities in the new SCRUM formation.  We use RACI (defined below) internally to help dictate everyone’s understanding of who makes which decisions and why. One of the best articles on the subjects of […]

Losing the Trees through the Forest

I have written a number of articles for this blog about our adoption of the SAFe framework for scaling Agile. However, it became obvious in late 2014 that we had a fundamental problem. No matter how well we did release planning, epic prioritization, or release trains, it wasn’t getting us where we need to go. […]

Stop Waiting for the Responsive Mockups!

[Editor’s Note: Our Tech Blog isn’t responsive yet, but it will be soon. We hesitated a little before publishing an article about the responsive process on a site that hasn’t gone through it yet — but decided to go ahead and publish it anyway! For some examples of where Constant Contact is using responsive design […]

When to Use the Agile Release Train

[Editor’s note: This post about using the Agile Release Train is the third is a series of posts by Mike Adler chronicling the Constant Contact engineering organization’s journey of transitioning to the SAFe Framework.] As an organization that develops world-class SaaS software, we want to leverage the benefits of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery processes.  […]

How Many X Should We Have?

In my last blog post I described our engineering organization and our selection of the Scaled Agile Framework to help us organize our Agile engineering teams.  Throughout the last month, we have been socializing and teaching the Epic/Feature/Story hierarchy to the product organization.  As part of this rollout, one of the transitions that we have […]