Articles on Scrum and Agile Project Management
This article focuses on the obstacles to using Agile in a distributed team environment and recommends how to counter them with what is called “de-Agile.” De-Agile is tailoring Agile to fit your team by taking out processes that don’t make sense and tweaking those that need to be modified to suit your needs. In a distributed team environment, de-Agile is mostly about removing the sense of being distributed. You need to educate each team member about the additional communication responsibilities required when working with remote team members and emphasize the importance of being open and available.
Does the term “documentation” have any place in an agile environment? The goal on agile projects is to keep documentation as simple as possible, relying on roadmaps, overviews and concepts rather than enterprise-focused details. But what happens when using an agile approach on more complex projects? For example, what if the team that writes the software is different from the team that must maintain it? Or what if auditors come calling? In these instances, basic agile documentation based on user stories alone may come up short. This article provides insights into how teams can take an agile approach to documentation in more complex environments.
This article discusses estimation techniques for teams that are adopting Scrum. The authors recommend to use story points during the release planning phase, but initially to switch to hours to estimate tasks during the sprint planning. Then the team will gradually move to using story points to estimate complete stories that members will commit for in next sprint.
Introducing Scrum in organizations is not always easy as there is always resistance to change. This article presents the implementation of an hybrid approach to make the transition to Scrum easier in a German context. After having identified the lack of requirements documentation as an obstacle to Scrum adoption, the author proposes different workarounds that allow to minimize this fear. Even if there is a risk that teams might stick with the hybrid approach, he considers that this is a valid alternative to the “total Scrum” adoption road and that this is the challenge of Scrum consultants to bring the teams to the next level.
When properly implemented, the Scrum framework enforces simple constraints that lead a team to self-organize into a state that achieves 5 to 10 times performance improvement versus traditional approaches. However, the majority of Scrum teams is unable achieve this objective.
The ScrumMaster is dealing daily to remove the issues that the team face. If he keeps in mind the role of the ScrumMaster as a servant leader, he will be better able to keep the team members motivated toward the goal, which will lead to better customer satisfaction in the end. On the other hand, if he follows the traditional role of a manager trying to ensure that he gets the work done, things may work out in the short term.
You company is transitioning to Agile and you need to hire people that will bring this type of expertise to you teams. This article propose 10 questions that you could ask to assess the vision of Agile by the prospective employees. The questions are only the first step and the article also provides guidelines on how to interpret the answers. It asks for instance “Did your iterations overlap? For instance, were the testers still testing Iteration 6 while Iteration 5 was being designed/developed?” and then discussed the status of multidisciplinary teams. Even if the material is more geared towards large organizations, every agile manager will find valuable content in it.
