If Scrum and Agile approaches are supposed to increase the chances of success for software development projects, not all the projects that want to use Scrum are successful. In some organizations, Scrum is a failure. This article discusses why Agile projects might fail because of the confusion between the Scrum roles (Scrum Master, Product Owner, Developer) of a Scrum Team and the required Agile mindsets.
“Agile has become overly decorated. Let’s scrape away those decorations for a minute, and get back to the center of Agile.” The Heart of Agile is a fresh look at Agile that strips away a lot of the cruft that has built up over recent years. Collaborate, Deliver, Reflect, Improve. Alistair Cockburn goes over the addition of kokoro onto the shu-ha-ri sequence, and its implications for agile.
Having a good Definition of Done (DoD) might be one of the most important technical asset of a Scrum team. This makes the difference between delivering at the end of the sprint fully completed business features or half-baked software. In his blog post “Changing the Definition of Done”, Ken Rubin discusses the situation where a Scrum team might want to change an existing Definition of Done.
Resistance to change is part of the human condition and overcoming this resistance is part of adopting Agile & Scrum and changing the way delivery teams work together. A large part of the prevailing certified methods are about tackling this problem in a variety of ways. How successful these methods are depends on many things and not least the starting conditions and senior leadership support. Without this kind of safety net creativity is called for and Tony Heap talks here about his experiences with a less head on approach to influencing things.
The ScrumMaster role might be the most difficult to define among the three roles involved in the Scrum team. Starting from a “bad” ScrumMaster job description, Agile coach Sam Laing discusses in this article the errors to avoid when you create a Scrum Master role specification. As a bonus, she provides at the end a good ScrumMaster job description.
Atlassian has just announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Trello, the online project management service that gained more than 19 million registered users in just five years. The acquisition is valued at approximately $425 million, which is comprised of approximately $360 million in cash and the remainder in Atlassian restricted shares, restricted share units and options to acquire Atlassian shares.
How do we actually know if our Agile teams are doing well? Is gut instinct enough? Furthermore, in a rapidly growing organization such as Spotify, how can we ensure some sort of consistency in our baseline level of Agile knowledge across the technology, product, and design organization?
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