scrumexpert

Empowering Scrum Teams

June 11, 2012 0

As Scrum teams should be self-managed and self-organized, they need empowerment, because without it, it is difficult for self-management and self-organization to happen. In this article, Jerry Rajamoney shares that the high-priority impediment item he has repeatedly faced as a ScrumMaster and struggled to solve is empowering the team. He gives four situations that could be considered as signals of lack of empowerment. He also notices that some issue come from the fact that managers are often asked to play the role of product owner or ScrumMaster, which creates confusion between the organizational role and their Scrum team role. A solution to these issues is proposed.

Giving Scrum Retrospectives Their Due Diligence

June 8, 2012 0

Scrum Retrospectives are not easy and this meeting is often the first one that will be canceled when there is some pressure to deliver a product. In this blog post, Mitch Lacey explains why retrospectives are so important in Scrum. He presents also some key components of an effective retrospective in a Scrum / Agile project and how to organize a retrospective meeting.

Getting Value from Your Scrum Daily Stand-up

June 6, 2012 0

Even if the Scrum daily stand-up meeting isn’t a status report, it is often easy for team members to slip into a pattern of providing status-related information. In this article, Eric King proposes different techniques that you can integrate in your daily stand-up meting to get more value out of it, setting a positive tone for the daily activities as people grow both as individuals and as a team. These techniques are Speed Scrum, Pass-the-Conch Scrum, Time-Box Scrum, Challenge Scrum, Impediments-Only Scrum, Award Scrum, Business Value-Focused Scrum, No-Board Scrum, Whiteboard Scrum and Buddy Scrum. Being able to overcome and adapt lies at the core of Scrum team. The stand-up is an essential part of our Agile/Scrum process, but team members should constantly seekg new ways to challenge each other. Even if you still use the proven stand-up approach, you can have great success in periodically spicing it up with the methods above. You will get the job done, but you will also find that a little laughter at the beginning of the day can set a great tone.

Agile Outsourcing Experience Report

June 5, 2012 0

In addition to the challenge of adopting Agile practices inside a company, many organizations adds another level of difficulty by outsourcing some of their development activities. In this blog post, Juan Banda provides an extensive experience report on outsourcing Agile with practical advice from somebody who’s been on the other side of the phone in an outsourced Agile team.

Clarify Business Value in Sprint Zero

May 30, 2012 0

When you explain the iterative/incremental nature of Agile, most people coming from a waterfall lifecycle say “What? No up-front planning at all?” Some Agile coaches would glibly say yes, but the truth is more complex. Sprint Zero is an Agile term for a time-boxed amount of up-front planning. During Sprint Zero, you identify value stories, get a decent backlog of user stories and you do some architectural proof-of-concepts. The trick is to balance between insufficient planning and analysis paralysis.

User Stories Traps and Tips

May 29, 2012 0

User stories are the foundations of the Scrum sprints as they would allow you to work on the right things. Charles Bradley provides a lot of interesting material about crafting good user stories in his Scrum Crazy blog. In a blog post he starts by discussing what a user story is and go right to the point is saying that a user story is NOT a “As a I want so that”. For him, a user story is more than this and should consist of three parts: 1) a written description or short title of the story used as a token for planning and as a reminder to have conversations, 2)conversations about the story that has the details of the story, 3)acceptance tests that that can be used to determine when a story is done.

Four Antipatterns of Pair Programming

May 23, 2012 0

Scrum likes to rely the technical practices recommended by eEXtreme Programming to improve the software quality. Pair programming is one of these practices, even if surveys tell us that it is not used as much as other practices like test-driven development (TDD). In this article, Zee Spencer shares four common pitfalls of pair programming and tell us how to avoid them.

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