Any framework worth using is built on principles and values. Each of the original agile practices – XP, Scrum, DSDM, Crystal, and FDD – as well as Kanban and Lean, has a set of core values. These values guide us, provide clarity in times of ambiguity, and, most importantly, help us understand why we do what we do. As you read in the story above, the team was attempting to go through the motions of Scrum, but they did not understand why.
How do agile projects accurately forecast their budget when they are typically just a bunch of hippies coding without requirements or documentation? Waterfall projects are obviously much better at budgeting with all of the traditional up front design and planning, right? Anyone who has been on a waterfall project can see that this is a complete fallacy.
In this article, Gunther Verheyen explains that pair programming is a good software development practice. Even if Scrum doesn’t prescribe specific engineering practices, Scrum fully supports the agile principle that says “Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility”.
In this excerpt of their book, Sam Guckenheimer and Neno Loje describes the mechanisms that Visual Studio (primarily Team Foundation Server [TFS]) provides to support the team enacting an Agile process. This article provides an inside-out overview of what makes the enactment of Agle possible in Visual Studio.
In a slightly provocatively titled “Why I’m done with Scrum” blog post, Jimmy Bogard provides four reasons reasons why he decided to abandon using Scrum to adopt a lean approach to software development.In his first two reasons, he discusses the inefficiencies of the iteration system.
This article from Rob Maher focuses on how to increase productivity. It discusses how changing a project staffing model could increase the productivity of project teams (PDF document). There is published evidence that short-lived groups of people brought together for a project are correlated with lower productivity. His view is that in an agile world, teams are permanent and the organization optimizes at the team level. Permanent teams enable consistent estimation, which is not possible using the matrix approach.
Scrum teams usually develop iteratively new product features. In larger project, teams can also be organized around layers or components of the product. In this article, Mukesh Chaudhary discusses how to manage the complexity with Scrum component teams and integration of their deliverables to make up a feature.
Scrum Expert Copyright © 2009-2024 Martinig & Associates