Blogs on Scrum and Agile Project Management
In this blog post, Pawel Brodzinski discusses the problem of the Product Role in Scrum teams. It is not always possible of having a client representative working closely with a project team. So the team should sometimes find other ways to get answer questions about the product and fill the product ownership activity. His conclusion is that knowing what is important to build is the essence of product ownership. A good Product Owner is only one way to achieve this objective.
In this blog post, Matt Archer shares his definition of the Agile Test Lead role and what he thinks they should contribute to Scrum teams. He says that behind the practical aspects of the Agile Test Lead role, there are also subtle connotations of coaching in this position. In his opinion, it is this coaching element that makes many Agile Test Leads valuable for the Scrum team they belong to.
Thom Roach shares with us in this blog post the metrics that he includes in iteration summary reports. The three main statistics he uses are Iteration Statistics summary, Iteration Cumulative Flow and Team Velocity Chart.
Mike Cohn wrote an interesting post where he discusses he allows or even encourages to estimate with story points as large as 20, 40, and 100. He explains that they are useful when you need first and not necessarily precise estimate of the general size of a new project being considered.
The topic of Managing Risk in Scrum projects is addressed by Valerie Morris in these two blog posts. The first part discusses the five risk areas found on most software projects: intrinsic schedule flaw, specification breakdown, scope creep, personnel loss and productivity variance. The second part compares risk management practices between traditional project management and Scrum.
Velocity is killing agility is the observation discussed by Jim Highsmith in this blog post. He explains that this metric is increasingly used for the wrong reasons: measuring productivity and focusing on volume delivery instead than on quality. He concludes saying that the importance given to velocity should be balanced with other metrics like feature value, feature delivery cycle time or quality.
Is the transition to Agile more difficult for late adopters? In this blog post that provides feedback about his attendance to the Conference on Lean Enterprise Software and Systems, Alan Shalloway explains that those taking on Agile are of a different mindset than those who made it initially successful. He also discusses Scrum-of-Scrums and preventing a “cargo cult” attitude towards agile practice.
