Velocity is one of the most common metrics used – and one of the most commonly misused – on Scrum and Agile projects. Velocity is simply a measurement of speed in a given direction, the rate at which a team is delivering toward a product release. As with a vehicle en route to a particular destination, increasing the speed may appear to ensure a timely arrival.
Sprint retrospectives are an important tool for Agile software development teams that want to implement continuous improvement and adjustment to their working context. In this article, Jesus Mendez provides some techniques that could help improving the outcome of your Sprint retrospectives.
Allan Kelly outlines the #NoProjects agenda and discusses the role of teams as the unit of production and the team life cycle. Good projects make for bad software. Software which is useful is used and demands change, stop changing it and you kill it. In a world without projects how do you manage work? The answer is teams. Teams are the means of production, work should be based around teams and teams should be stable.
The creation of Agile approaches was also a reaction against huge and useless requirements documents, either textual or using modeling techniques like UML. All the values of the past should however not be discarded in the requirements activity. In his book “Agile Software Requirements”, Dean Leffingwell explains how user stories are different from use cases and software specifications.
Most ScrumMasters are quite fluent in “Scrum”, but they lack experience in System and Complexity Thinking. Most projects don’t fail because of the wrong tools, but because of people and a missing understanding about the system that we are all part of.
Using an Agile approach for software development does not necessarily guarantee success. As Henrik Kniberg wrote at the beginning of his blog post ” Even if the entire organization is neatly organized into scrum teams, you can still end up with an unaligned mess!”. Having an Agile leader can help preventing the unaligned mess.
The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is controversial. At first glance SAFe looks a bit like a big scary heavy-weight top-down RUP-zombie. But what about in real life?
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