Even if the the Agile Manifesto declares that you should value “individuals and interactions over processes and tools”, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use any tool. The authors of this article shares their experience using agile tools and explains why they prefer non-software tools and why you should be carefully pick the tools that will support your practice and your company if you pick any at all.
The topic of Managing Risk in Scrum projects is addressed by Valerie Morris in these two blog posts. The first part discusses the five risk areas found on most software projects: intrinsic schedule flaw, specification breakdown, scope creep, personnel loss and productivity variance. The second part compares risk management practices between traditional project management and Scrum.
Have you worked on a distributed team where management apparently thought it should hobble local members to make everybody equally frustrated and ineffective? The Agile Manifesto principles say that: 1) Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project. 2) The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
Software defects are annoyances for everyone. If your organization is like most, you have a large queue of defects waiting to be fixed. It’s probably not realistic to think you will get around to fixing all of these bugs; so, you need to consider other approaches. Janet Gregory, author of the book Agile Testing with Lisa Crispin, facilitated a workshop to help you develop a strategy for how your team can address defects in an agile manner.
Velocity is killing agility is the observation discussed by Jim Highsmith in this blog post. He explains that this metric is increasingly used for the wrong reasons: measuring productivity and focusing on volume delivery instead than on quality. He concludes saying that the importance given to velocity should be balanced with other metrics like feature value, feature delivery cycle time or quality.
The Scrum Expectation Line is defined by Zsolt Fabók as the line that follows the expectations of the Product Owner during each sprint. In this blog post, he discusses the difference between the team capacity to deliver and what the Product Owner wants in each Sprint and explains how his team deals with it.
Is the transition to Agile more difficult for late adopters? In this blog post that provides feedback about his attendance to the Conference on Lean Enterprise Software and Systems, Alan Shalloway explains that those taking on Agile are of a different mindset than those who made it initially successful. He also discusses Scrum-of-Scrums and preventing a “cargo cult” attitude towards agile practice.
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