The product owner is a very important component in a Scrum team, as it is the force driving the team towards the satisfaction of the end-user needs. This is a different situation if you are in a small startup or responsible for a large, established product line. In this blog post, Roman Pichler discusses the differences between small and big product owners.
One of the most important, and often overlook, sentence in the principles of the Agile Manifesto is “continuous delivery of valuable software”. Delivering value is an important principle for Agile and prioritization is the tool that allows to deliver value quickly. This is the topic discussed by Daniel Zacarias in his article “20 Product Prioritization Techniques: A Map and Guided Tour”.
How much does one story point cost? Is Sprint 0 an expense or an asset? Can you run Scrum with a fixed-cost contract? Agile challenges the existing approach to financial aspects of running projects, that is budgeting, forecasting, financial planning and vendor contracts.
Based on their experience with Trade Me, New Zealand’s largest e-commerce company, Sandy Mamoli and David Mole have written a complete guide on why and how you could implement a self-selection process for your teams. If you believe in self-organization for Agile project management teams, you should also think about self-selection.
One might wonder why it’s not so easy to adopt agile engineering practices and to achieve technical excellence. When we think of practices, we tend to think of simple things: sticking a shopping list on the fridge with a magnet, having a clear and prioritized list of things to do, and doing them in that order. Why is it then that with Agile practices, things don’t work out quite so well?
Story point is a arbitrary relative measure used by Scrum teams to define the effort required to implement one story. In this article, Mahfoud Amiour proposes an approach to measure the cost of story points implementation.
Even if Agile was initially considered as an anarchic approach due to practices like self-organization, the reality is that it requires a lot of discipline. Metrics is an important tool to assess the continuous improvement efforts of Scrum teams. However, setting a good metric program is not obvious. The book “The Agile Culture” contains interesting thoughts about what could make a metrics program fail.
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