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The Art of Prioritization: How to Choose Right Features for Development

Reading time5 min
Views6.5K
What is prioritization about? Product managers will agree that it’s rather critical to choose the right features for development, filter the most important of them and skip less urgent ones. This is all about the art of prioritization.

If you are not sure about your prioritization skills and want to get more, this quick guide will assist to discover how to find the evaluation criteria for your product and how to select appropriate strategic growth metrics. You will also find out how to offer more value to customers and establish all internal processes inside your team with the help of prioritization methods.

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Quality as Team's responsibility. Our QA experience

Reading time7 min
Views2.1K

Disclaimer: This is a translation of an article. All rights belongs to author of original article and Miro company.


I'm a QA Engineer in Miro. Let me tell about our experiment of transferring partially testing tasks to developers and of transforming Test Engineer role into QA (Quality assurance).


First briefly about our development process. We have daily releases for client side and 3 to 5 weekly releases of server side. Team have 60+ people spitted onto 10 Functional Scrum Teams.


I'm working in Integration team. Our tasks are:


  • Integration of our service into external products
  • Integration of external products into our service
    For example we have integrated Jira. Jira Cards — visual representation of tasks so it's useful to work with tasks not opening Jira at all.

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How the experiment starts


All starts with trivial issue. When someone of Test Engineers had sick leave then team performance was degraded significantly. Team was continued working on tasks. However when code was reached testing phase task was hold on. As a result new functionality didn't reach production in time.


Going onto vacation by Test Engineer is a more complex story. He/she needs to find another Test Engineer who ready to take extra tasks and conduct knowledge sharing. Going onto vacation by two Test Engineers at the sane time is not an applicable luxury.

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How to Wrap Up a Software Development Project the Right Way

Reading time3 min
Views3K
Does the New Year have you scrambling to wrap up last year’s software development projects? Don’t archive your Jira tickets and Trello boards too quickly!

A good rule of thumb in software development is that your next software project should always be better than your last. Why? Because the lessons you learn and take away from each project should be continuously documented and applied in future projects.

In the words of Rachel Green, every good project should end with closure.

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Follow this quick and easy 6-step guide to ensure that you wrap up your software project efficiently and effectively.

6 Steps for Successfully Wrapping up a Software Development Project


1. Document future needs

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How Gantt Charts Simplify and Empower Project Management

Reading time4 min
Views3.7K
Whether you are a project management guru or just a beginner, you’ve definitely heard about Gantt charts. At first sight, these diagrams might seem chilling and complicated, however, they are not as mystifying as you may think.

Gantt Charts assist project managers and their teams to improve their productivity and efficiency of workflows and ensure timely tasks execution. The charts can be applied to small projects and the most complex ones. What are the secrets of the diagrams developed by Henry Gantt and what people in project management used before they were created?

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How to Repair a Backyard Swimming Pool in 7 Hours Using the Critical Path Method?

Reading time5 min
Views1.9K
The working arsenal of any project manager consists of own stable methodological reserves and secrets of management. Everyone strives for effective business outcomes based on their own intuition, practical experience, professional tools, and well-known techniques. These outcomes can be achieved if there is no chaos in the project life cycle, and the manager knows what to do at each stage, including determining the critical path of the project.

What is the value of determining the critical path and why is the critical path method (CPM) necessary? In this post, the example of how to determine the critical path. So, let's repair the old backyard swimming pool with the help of CPM.

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How to run Scrum efficiently in 2019? Quick guide for beginners

Reading time6 min
Views12K
Every «hype» thing or event has a certain regularity: the more people talk about it, the less they really know about it. Scrum is not an exception. You may find hundreds of relevant articles and IT news, where it may seem that there is only one best Agile methodology and this is Scrum. A large Agile family contains various powerful methodologies and Scrum is not the sole system of implementing Agile principles. However, this methodology is still actively used all over the world.

People go mad about Scrum: many IT blogs write about it, many practical courses promise to teach all Scrum features, many companies want to see a working experience with Scrum in CVs, and so on. Scrum conquers them all. In this post, we define why.

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Use-Case Evolution Guide

Level of difficultyMedium
Reading time13 min
Views1.2K

Modern product development demands more and more sophisticated designs. This in turn leads to the increased complexity of both demand and implementation. Business is flooding the architecture and development teams with the new and changed requirements. Development teams are struggling to understand what the business demand is and find the best product increment strategy. One of the widely adopted conversational methods is the Use-Cases. This guide is intended to shed light on the process of the requirements development and maturing.

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Startups going global: a guide to Product Hunt

Reading time4 min
Views2.2K

Product Hunt is a Y-combinator backed discovery platform, founded by Ryan Hoover in 2013. Conceived as an email list, it has gone on to become one of the most popular directories, raised $7.5 million in backing and was acquired by AngelList — a social network for entrepreneurs — in December 2016.

Exposure on the platform contributed to viral successes of Yo and Ship Your Enemies Glitter, and brought multi-million dollar companies, like Robinhood and Gimlet Media, to the public eye.

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10 Reasons to Apply Kanban Boards as a Current Software Development Trend

Reading time6 min
Views1.8K
It is not always easy to find out the right path in development processes (as in other business activities). Various obstructions may disturb. The future life of any product or service depends on choosing an appropriate development methodology. As Kanban is often named as one of the current trends in project management, here we gathered the most essential benefits of Kanban software development and applying convenient Kanban boards and cards. Just to be trendy ;)

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Basic Agile Practices for Technical and Non-Technical Teams in 2019

Reading time6 min
Views2.2K
Teams that apply popular Agile practices explain why they have chosen this methodology in their own ways. For someone, it seems obvious to work with obligatory and “sacred” Agile; someone can define non-binding or controversial practices. In any case, Agile is one of the most popular methodologies in project management nowadays. Its practices and concepts are appreciated by many developers and managers around the globe.

What are these powerful practices that make Agile popular and trendy? Here we share the list that is definitely incomplete but foundational.

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How we test the backend

Level of difficultyEasy
Reading time13 min
Views2.3K

We are a brokerage platform operating in a dynamic and complex domain. This specificity comes with a set of challenges. On the one hand, it entails a high variability of scenarios and potentially significant risks associated with errors. On the other hand, it has short development iterations with frequent delivery cycles. 

In this article, we will share how we maintain the quality of our numerous backend services, which provide essential information to our trading terminals.

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From Idea to Release: The Product Owner’s Role in Feature Development at Exante

Level of difficultyEasy
Reading time6 min
Views4.5K

Why might a feature not get to production on time? What prevents the team from releasing before the deadline? Can the product owner influence the timeline?

In this article, I will try to answer these questions and suggest solutions for the processes we are implementing and improving within the product team at EXANTE.

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How to Become a Leading Scrum Master and Rock the Team?

Reading time6 min
Views4.1K
Scrum allows Agile teams working on complex projects and delivering winning products by solving problems adaptively. This popular straightforward method is widely used to handle projects and get things done. Scrum projects more accurately fulfill customers' needs because they encourage continuous feedback.

There is no need for detailed analytics to understand that Scrum continues to grow in popularity just because of its many benefits and general effectiveness. And the important merit in this belongs to a Scrum Master. In this post, we extol and praise the role of a Scrum Master, without which no Scrum project succeeds.

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What are the Types of Scrum Ceremonies and Their Best Practices?

Reading time5 min
Views4.4K
Scrum includes a series of special meetings, commonly referred to ceremonies, which assist to facilitate all the methodology’s processes.

Scrum strongly enforces the goals and time boxes for everything, including the ceremonies. This post covers these outstanding events and identifies the goals for each as well as their necessity. Take 7-8 minutes to figure them out.

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Scrum vs Kanban: Keep Calm and Choose What Suits You Better

Reading time5 min
Views4.2K
When it comes to choosing between two options, there is always a risk to be influenced by opinions and dubious facts. Selecting any methodology or work approach, we strive to avoid mistakes and study as many facts and details about the subject as possible to make the right choice.

In Agile software development, this choice is also challenging, especially if it's about Scrum and Kanban.

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14 Best Kanban Board Tools in 2019

Reading time9 min
Views12K
When it comes to optimizing overwhelmed daily workloads, to-do lists may not cope. In this case, it's worth to look for something that will keep track of all tasks your team is working on and tasks that are yet to be started, as well as to show the full picture of all the tasks that are completed.

A powerful Kanban board is the solution. This excellent project collaboration tool is widely used in software development, digital marketing, construction, innovative solutions and among other cases where there is a steady workflow of tasks. The Kanban approach helps teams to visualize workflow, analyze processes and achieve greater task management efficiencies. In this post, we describe 14 Kanban tools with advanced features. Compare them and choose the best one right for your needs!

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Introduction to ICE Scoring for Product Feature Prioritization

Reading time3 min
Views7.3K
It is difficult to imagine a situation when a product manager does not face prioritization challenges. Can you quickly decide what to place to the first place?

Any product timeline requires a clear order and only qualitatively decomposed and managed tasks will lead you to a decent and successful product release. In this case, you will not successfully perform without a powerful prioritization. Where to start and how to define the most appropriate prioritization method? Especially if you are a newcomer in the product management world? Here we describe the ICE scoring prioritization method that empowers product managers to choose the right features for development.

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8 simple ways to improve UI/UX of any software product over time

Level of difficultyEasy
Reading time4 min
Views811

Creation of a UX design for a software product is an ongoing process: it doesn’t stop after the product is released. In order for an app or a website to always remain comfortable to use while corresponding to the constantly changing trends, its UX design must be improved from time to time, and in some cases even rethinked and radically changed. An outdated, old-fashioned design with unimproved bugs will definitely spoil user experience and lead to loss of audience. Design improvements include not only bug fixing and “brushing up” the facade of a product, but also constant research and implementation of new ideas that can contribute to its growth. Let’s discuss a few simple steps that can improve the UX design of any product. 

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Business process management. Part 1. Why bother?

Level of difficultyEasy
Reading time4 min
Views18K

This is the first post in a series on Business Process Management (BPM). Having worked as a business analyst and product manager in various companies ranging from middle-sized startups to big corporations, I have observed differences in approaches to business process management - from almost complete disregard to excessive attention. So, I decided to share my views on the topic, why I think BPM is important, especially when a company grows fast and switches from the startup stage to a grown company, and what approach I think might work for a company of average size without involving too much time and resources.

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