Articles on Scrum and Agile Project Management
Even if the Scrum daily stand-up meeting isn’t a status report, it is often easy for team members to slip into a pattern of providing status-related information. In this article, Eric King proposes different techniques that you can integrate in your daily stand-up meting to get more value out of it, setting a positive tone for the daily activities as people grow both as individuals and as a team. These techniques are Speed Scrum, Pass-the-Conch Scrum, Time-Box Scrum, Challenge Scrum, Impediments-Only Scrum, Award Scrum, Business Value-Focused Scrum, No-Board Scrum, Whiteboard Scrum and Buddy Scrum. Being able to overcome and adapt lies at the core of Scrum team. The stand-up is an essential part of our Agile/Scrum process, but team members should constantly seekg new ways to challenge each other. Even if you still use the proven stand-up approach, you can have great success in periodically spicing it up with the methods above. You will get the job done, but you will also find that a little laughter at the beginning of the day can set a great tone.
In addition to the challenge of adopting Agile practices inside a company, many organizations adds another level of difficulty by outsourcing some of their development activities. In this blog post, Juan Banda provides an extensive experience report on outsourcing Agile with practical advice from somebody who’s been on the other side of the phone in an outsourced Agile team.
Scrum likes to rely the technical practices recommended by eEXtreme Programming to improve the software quality. Pair programming is one of these practices, even if surveys tell us that it is not used as much as other practices like test-driven development (TDD). In this article, Zee Spencer shares four common pitfalls of pair programming and tell us how to avoid them.
The DSDM consortium has published a new paper “DSDM Agile Project Framework“. Dynamic systems development method (DSDM) was created in 1994. It an agile project delivery framework, primarily used as a software development method. This version of the Agile Project Framework has been tailored specifically to complement Scrum. The DSDM Agile Project framework brings together the strength of DSDM at project level and the streamlined simplicity of Scrum at the delivery team level.
This article discusses the the role of the Product Owner in moving a backlog item to done. It explores how to achieve the productivity benefits of an up-front enabling specification, given the reality that Scrum is an empirical framework in which emergent understanding of the story under development is inherent.
Trac is an open source enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects. Trac uses a minimalist approach to web-based software project management. It provides an interface to version control systems (Subversion, Git, Mercurial, …), an integrated Wiki and convenient reporting facilities. As many open source project, Trac has a plugin architecture that allows to extend the core functionalities. Here is a list of Scrum and Agile oriented plugins available in the Trac ecosystem.
The Scrum of Scrums is the key for scaling large, multidimensional projects that cross departments, teams, and traditional boundary lines so that can be managed using the same protocols and logic of a fundamental, small-team project. Bryan Zarnett explains that where most ScrumMasters fail in this large-scale environment is in the nuances of communicating and coordinating multiple teams. The same tool set used to run a small Scrum team cannot be used for a collective of teams. He defines the role of an Agile Program Manager (APM) that will coordinate the program portfolio and its dependencies and manage collective activities, issues, and risks. Regardless of design, the APM cannot operate 100 percent according to a Scrum textbook. Minor modifications to the tool set and the introduction of key new responsibilities will adapt and influence Scrum in minor ways that will allow the larger program context to be applied — and will allow teams to remain Agile even as size and interdependencies increase.
