Articles on Scrum and Agile Project Management
T-shaped skills is a metaphor used to describe people with deep vertical skills in a specialized area as well as broader but not necessarily deep skills in other areas. This is a base for cross-functional Scrum teams, but people can resist this. Learn why and what you can do to change this.
The ScrumMaster role is certainly the most original addition of Scrum to the concept of software development teams. How and how much the ScrumMaster should be involved with the teams is a topic for debates in the Agile community. Isn’t the Scrum team supposed to be self-organized in the first place? In this article, Zuzi Šochová, author of The Great ScrumMaster, shares her opinion on some of the common mistakes made by ScrumMasters.
Sometimes, organizations adopting an Agile approach are mostly following Scrum practices like rituals. They might do daily stand-up meetings but do not perceive that the real goal is to deliver quickly value to the customer. In an article, Vinod Santhanam explains how the Value-Oriented Incremental Delivery (Void) approach can help Agile teams to achieve this goal.
In a Scrum team, there are three roles: Product Owner, Development Team and Scrum Master. There is no explicit mention of software testers and some could question if testing specialists are really necessary in Scrum teams. After working on several projects, Eric Delahaye has found that they are and shares with us four reasons why they should be included as soon as the first Sprint Planning.
If metrics like lines of code or code coverage are widely known by the software development community, measuring the joy of a software development team is certainly something more rarely discussed. In this article, Doc Norton proposes a simple way to asses the happiness of your software developers using the quality of your existing code. With this, you can lower your Scrum team turnover and get hints for refactoring needs.
Agile approaches are used to generate quicker feedback that supports continuous improvement. Giving proper feedback is important between Scrum team members or with other project stakeholders. This is however hard and this article provides some hints on how to make it easier.
Is hiring for an Agile team (team member, scrummaster or product owner) different than hiring for a software development organization that follows another approach? Scrum.org and McKinsey & Company have recently published the results of a joint study exploring the values and traits that make agile teams successful. The goal of this document is to help and guide organizations with concepts and ways to better recruit and coach their teams.
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