The average Scrum team delivered a 35% improvement in velocity at Yahoo [1] where teams properly coached delivered 300-400% improvements. The best Scrum Master at MySpace peaked at 267% of initial velocity after 12 weeks and averaged 168% increase in velocity over 12 Sprints. Most teams were less successful.
Technical debt is the consequence of poor or evolving software architecture and software development within a codebase. The debt can be thought of as work that needs to be done before a particular job can be considered complete. In this blog post, Bastian Buch proposes an agile approach to reduce technical debt. He first declares that technical debt hasn’t improve through agile development methods and principles, but only gained some visibility.
Utpal Vaishnav shares with us his experience as a new ScrumMaster in this article titled “Seven Things I Wish I’d Known When I Started out as a ScrumMaster“.
Project charter discussions and documentation focuses traditionally on project scope and the goals and objectives for the project. To address specificity of Agile project, the author of this article has recently created and successfully utilized an Agile Development Team Charter. It differs from usual project charter as it focuses more on the ‘how’ of the project.
Alistair Cockburn describes software development as a cooperative game. Scrum provides one set of rules for one such way of playing the game. The Scrum Guide is the official rule book. However, the Scrum Guide doesn’t tell you the rationale behind Scrum as a whole, or behind many of its successful practices. Those rationales come out of experience, community, and the insights of its founders and inventors. The ScrumPLoP mission is to build a body of pattern literature around those communities, describing those insights, so we can easily share them with the Scrum and Agile communities.
We would like solutions delivered fast without compromising quality, user experience, implicit requirements and non-functional aspects such as scalability and performance. This would have been easier, if we had all the time in the universe. Doing this in a sustainable manner becomes a huge challenge for teams as there are multiple competing forces at play and because software development is very complex.
This article discusses the challenges that Agile brings to the appraisal process. Agile methodology focuses on team performance more than on the individual. The objectives of the team aren’t easily broken down by individual; one cannot appraise the individual on the basis of team performance. This article presents a workable solution for appraising Scrum team members. This will address problems raised while remaining within the Agile framework and philosophy. If a team is self-organizing, per the Agile framework, we can empower that team to raise itself to a “self-appraising team.”
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