One of the first steps in an Agile adoption is the formation and organization of agile teams. Leadership often struggles to figure out how many people should be on each team, what skill sets should included, and whether the team should be focused on solution components, feature delivery, or a mix.
How do you manage activities that don’t seem directly related to features in your Scrum sprints? This blog post discusses why it is a problem when Scrum teams start to wonder about having time to manage infrastructure, technical debt or test framework. For Johanna Rothman this is the sign that the culture is not Agile enough and that the product owner doesn’t want to take iteration time to schedule anything other than features in an iteration. She offers seven hints on how to improve this situation, saying that product owners that don’t want to fund technical debt will instead create more of it.
The nice metaphor of technical debt introduced some 18 years ago by Ward Cunningham has slowly taken roots in our collective conceptual toolbox, as a nice way to express some of the pains that software projects suffer from. Most software developers who have had some experience with significant, long-lived projects can feel it, sometimes point to it, but more than often can’t do much about it. In most cases, technical debt is seen as something very negative, burdening projects forever under increasing amount of interests. But some technical debt can be deliberate, more akin to borrowing to make an strategic investment, and this is especially the case for architectural-level debt.
As Agile approaches are gaining acceptance in software development organization, this article discusses how Agile could impact the support and maintenance processes of existing mature products.
The adoption of Agile approaches has introduced new ways of thinking about Project Management, which impact Project Management Organizations in various ways. This paper divides the range of practices commonly found in Project Management Office (PMO) into Project Management, Program Management and Portfolio Management. It identifies how the introduction of Agile processes such as Scrum impacts the PMO.
Burn charts are a simple method to monitor work progress in Scrum. This article discusses the details of burn down and burn up charts: which units to measure, how to adapt to scope variations. He gives some guidelines on how to interpret burndown charts. He reminds that the chart should be objective and visible.
Pair programming is sometimes the norm, and some developers really enjoy the collaboration, experiencing enhanced productivity. In other teams, pairing is shunned, avoided, or… faked. Angela Harms did a short survey about pairing attitudes and compared successful and unsuccessful pairing experiences.
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