Articles on Scrum and Agile Project Management
In this article, Davide Noaro discusses the software testing phase of Scrum projects with a final Waterfall interaction. As Scrum’s adoption is often incremental inside an organization, both approaches can coexist for a while. Compared to a full Scrum approach is that, in this situation you are obliged to rerun the tests for the whole functionality to qualify the product before going to production. In the article, he presents how software testing has been integrated into his organization’s process and then analyze the objections that are sometimes raised on the software testing choice made, mainly that running tests for every user story is inefficient because they have to rerun them for the whole functionality during the Waterfall at end phase.
The average Scrum team delivered a 35% improvement in velocity at Yahoo [1] where teams properly coached delivered 300-400% improvements. The best Scrum Master at MySpace peaked at 267% of initial velocity after 12 weeks and averaged 168% increase in velocity over 12 Sprints. Most teams were less successful.
Utpal Vaishnav shares with us his experience as a new ScrumMaster in this article titled “Seven Things I Wish I’d Known When I Started out as a ScrumMaster“.
Project charter discussions and documentation focuses traditionally on project scope and the goals and objectives for the project. To address specificity of Agile project, the author of this article has recently created and successfully utilized an Agile Development Team Charter. It differs from usual project charter as it focuses more on the ‘how’ of the project.
This article discusses the challenges that Agile brings to the appraisal process. Agile methodology focuses on team performance more than on the individual. The objectives of the team aren’t easily broken down by individual; one cannot appraise the individual on the basis of team performance. This article presents a workable solution for appraising Scrum team members. This will address problems raised while remaining within the Agile framework and philosophy. If a team is self-organizing, per the Agile framework, we can empower that team to raise itself to a “self-appraising team.”
This is an interesting interview of Ward Cunningham that talks about technical debt. Ward Cunningham was the first to drew a comparison between technical complexity and debt in 1992. In this interview, he talks, amongst other topics, about the relationship between technical debt and developer experience or when accumulation of debt is a good thing.
As Scrum teams should be self-managed and self-organized, they need empowerment, because without it, it is difficult for self-management and self-organization to happen. In this article, Jerry Rajamoney shares that the high-priority impediment item he has repeatedly faced as a ScrumMaster and struggled to solve is empowering the team. He gives four situations that could be considered as signals of lack of empowerment. He also notices that some issue come from the fact that managers are often asked to play the role of product owner or ScrumMaster, which creates confusion between the organizational role and their Scrum team role. A solution to these issues is proposed.
