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Stand-up summaries – an excellent tool to boost productivity in Agile software development teams

Posted on: February 14th, 2026 by Olu No Comments

Hi Folks,

In this post I discuss a great tool for keeping software development teams accountable. It’s called the Stand-up summary.

How does it work?

In teams that adopt Agile methodology, it’s common to have daily stand-up meetings where developers discuss what they have worked on, what they plan to work on, etc.
A stand-up summary is a short summary of the action points for each member (usually software developers) in the team, saying what they plan to work on that day.

This summary can be written by the facilitator for the meeting and posted onto a shared location, easily accessible by all members of the team, e.g. the team group chat (think of MS Teams, Slack, etc.), shortly after the meeting ends.

What are the advantages of using stand-up summaries?

  • It helps to keep each team member focused on their goals for the day and minimise distractions.
  • It gives visibility to the rest of the team so that the team leader can more easily help each member to make sure the entire team meets its goals.
  • It helps gives visibility of the team’s daily goals to other stakeholders who may not necessarily be the software developers themselves.
  • It helps keep each team member accountable. Knowing that one’s goals has been posted on to the team group chat motivates one to strive to fulfil the goals promptly.

That’s all for now. Till next time, happy software development.

How to disable a test class or method in Java

Posted on: April 26th, 2024 by Olu No Comments

Hi folks,

In this brief post, we will talk about how to disable a test class or method in a Java-based project. Why would you want to do this? It could be because the test isn’t yet fully implemented. Another situation is if you have Continuous Integration in place where tests are run automatically during a build, but a certain test class isn’t yet ready for automatic execution.

To disable a test class or method, you can use the Disabled annotation from JUnit. E.g.

import org.junit.jupiter.api.Disabled
...

@Disabled
class YourTestClass {
...
}

That’s it. Now such a test would be ignored. That’s all for now. Till next time, happy software development.

 

References

Disabled (JUnit 5.0.0-M2 API). https://junit.org/junit5/docs/5.0.0-M2/api/org/junit/jupiter/api/Disabled.html

How to manage software development teams in an Agile manner

Posted on: March 4th, 2023 by Olu No Comments

Hi folks,

In this blog I discuss a few practices that can help one manage a software development team effectively using the Agile methodology. They are as follows:

  • Use good tools e.g. Jira or Trello to manage requirements.
  • Use a backlog to store all requirements that may be useful to complete by the team but are not ready for current work.
  • Clarify new requirements from business before presenting it to software development team – this can be done by development team lead or business analyst.
  • Have your software devleopment team estimate efforts to complete requirements together as a group. You can use story points to estimate efforts where story points may be roughly mapped to days. it’s common for teams to use fibonacci sequence for story points.
  • Break down large requirements into smaller tasks that can each be completed within a couple of days.
  • Have daily stand-up calls to monitor progress of the software development team.
  • Have periodic sprints of e.g. 1 week or 2 weeks to serve as checkpoints to monitor progress of the development team.
  • Don’t drag requirements from sprint to sprint unnecessarily. Try to have the team complete requirements they have committed to complete in a given sprint.
  • If you’re nearing the end of a sprint and a developer needs a task to pick up, you can look at any task in the backlog that can to be completed within the sprint and assign that task to the developer. If there’s no such task, you can look at sub-tasks of any larger tasks in the backlog that can be completed in the sprint. You can then convert that sub-task into a regular task (you can update the task title to indicate it’s a sub-task of the parent for easier tracking). Then assign the new task to the developer.
  • Perform retrospectives from time to time to get feedback from developers on how they’re faring with work.
  • Have frequent software releases to production. Don’t let features pile up too much otherwise it could lead to difficult in troubleshooting issues.

Till next time, happy software development.