Blogs on Scrum and Agile Project Management
Metrics are an important part of Agile project management approaches like Scrum. One of the most used measures to estimate the amount of work are the story points. In this small article, Pedro Gustavo Torres explains what they are, why you need them and how to use them.
Using an Agile approach for software development does not necessarily guarantee success. As Henrik Kniberg wrote at the beginning of his blog post ” Even if the entire organization is neatly organized into scrum teams, you can still end up with an unaligned mess!”. Having an Agile leader can help preventing the unaligned mess.
The frontier is somewhat thin between analyzing things for continous improvement in Agile and blaming people for failure. In this blog post, John Allspaw discusses how Etsy wants to consider mistakes, errors, slips or lapses with a perspective of learning. he explains how having blameless post-mortems on outages and accidents are part of this approach.
Story mapping is a technique invented by Jeff Patton that order user stories along two independent dimensions. The “map” arranges user activities along the horizontal axis in rough order of priority. On the vertical axis, it represents increasing sophistication of the implementation. In his blog post, Sunit Parekh explains how you can apply story maps to build your product backlog in a visual way.
Technical debt is a well-known concept in Agile software development. Technical Debt is defined as the eventual consequences of poor or evolving software architecture and software development within a codebase. In this blog post, Steve Blank discusses the concept of organizational debt.
The product owner is a very important component in a Scrum team, as it is the force driving the team towards the satisfaction of the end-user needs. This is a different situation if you are in a small startup or responsible for a large, established product line. In this blog post, Roman Pichler discusses the differences between small and big product owners.
Pair programming is one of the original practice of eXtreme programming, but it is also one of the least used by Agile software development teams. In his blog post, Alisdair McDiarmid explains how Customer.io uses pair programming with remote teams.