Get ready to roll

User stories are the engine that drives many Agile projects. Coming up with a definition of ready can help you tune the engine before you hit the gas.

A definition of ready spells out the criteria your user stories must meet before development can start, to ensure they deliver value quickly.

If you think a definition of ready might help your team, check out this blog post. You’ll find out what makes a good definition of ready and when your team might need one. And you’ll get a couple of examples for inspiration.

Art for art’s sake

Boost’s Welly contingent (at least those not laid low by various lurgies) got together last week to celebrate another successful quarter.

We joined Alex from Paintvine for an evening of drinks, nibbles and unparalleled artistic excellence.

Observe the fruit of our labours above and be amazed.

Affinity mapping — an easy way to gather and analyse ideas as a team

Affinity mapping lets you solve problems, answer questions and make plans as a team. You generate a pool of ideas, spot patterns and then sum these up to guide your next steps.

What you need

• Post-its
• Sharpies
• Whiteboard
• Whiteboard markers

How it works

It’s a 6S process:

• State the goal
• Silent brainstorm
• Share out loud
• Sort
• Sum up
• Select your next step

State the goal

Start by letting people know what you want to achieve.

Silent brainstorm

Working separately, everyone writes down ideas for ways to achieve the goal, one idea per post-it. Any idea is a good one. You want to generate as many as possible.

Share out loud

Everyone takes turns to read out each of their ideas, clarifying as required. They stick these up on the whiteboard.

Sort the ideas

Then everyone comes up to the whiteboard and groups like with like. Put identical ideas on top of each other. Put similar ideas side by side. This creates clusters of related ideas. If different people see different groupings, discuss and agree as you go.

Sum up the clusters

Ask the team how they would summarise what each cluster covers and write the summary on the whiteboard. It's OK to have singletons.

Select your next step

You can now vote on the most important grouping and your next step.

We often use 3-2-1 voting. Everyone gets to vote for 3 choices, giving their top choice 3 votes (as ticks or tally marks beside that item on the whiteboard), their next highest 2 votes and their 3rd highest 1.

Cloud Native summit kicks off this week

Just two more sleeps until the Cloud Native conference kicks off at Te Papa here in Wellington. First up it’s the workshops on Thursday 4 August, then the full conference on Friday 5 August.

If you’re attending, we’d love to see you at our sponsor’s booth. You’ll be able to grab some swag and be in to win some great prizes in our Guess the cloud competition.

New all-of-government AWS cloud services agreement

There's now a new all-of-government agreement in place with Amazon Web Services (AWS) for public cloud services.

The new agreement includes AWS programmatic offerings and offers standardised terms for government.