Articles on Scrum and Agile Project Management
An introduction to the software estimation process aimed at project managers, developers and customers who want to get a better understanding of the basics this subject, and avoid to make their projects a death march one.
If you have never experienced a well-run retrospective, then it is hard to imagine what it is like by simply reading a book. Nevertheless, the article “An anatomy of a retrospective” tries to tie many of the discussions into a single experience. It is based on one real-life retrospective, but spiced up with a few pieces from other retrospectives. I’m certain the participants would recognize themselves, but I hope I have changed enough of the trivia to protect their privacy.
This article “Scrum Roles – an Unsolvable Puzzle?” discusses the different roles in Scrum projects and how you can relate them to traditional project management roles.
The Core Protocols are our ‘best practices’ for people, teams of people and organizations that want to get great results – all the time. They are ‘Core’ because they are foundational – they can be used by all teams, anywhere, even if you already have organizational patterns and best practices of your own. They are ‘Protocols’ because they name and prescribe ways that people can interact (behavior), predictably, like the ‘protocols’ followed in diplomacy.
One of the cornerstones of Scrum is the self-organizing team: one able to make decisions in relation to the target to which it has committed. “Coaching Scrum Teams” addresses how to form groups of individualists into cohesive teams, where the members support each other and make use of each other’s strengths.
In his article “Effective Retrospectives & Reviews” Marco Mulder illustrates how Scrum teams can continuously improve by using a combination of their definition of done, working agreements and the product backlog.
Some people want to take the stance that no work should be done in advance of the sprint. That is clearly untenable. To see why, let’s take that view to its extreme: If we did nothing in advance to understand what we’re building, we’d show up at the planning meeting and say, “Hey, what should we build this sprint? We were working on an eCommerce site yesterday, but I think maybe we should switch to writing a word processor…” The team would literally have nothing written down—no product backlog / user stories / prioritized feature list at all.
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