Blogs on Scrum and Agile Project Management
The Toyota Kata is a management book by Mike Rother. it can be defined as a systematic, scientific set of routines that activate and mobilize people’s creative capabilities to meet challenging goals. In this blog post, Håkan Forss, a Lean/Agile Coach in Sweden, introduces the Toyota Kata as an alternative or as a complement to agile retrospectives.
In Scrum, the standard format of a user story is easy to understand: “As a [role] I want [something] so that I can [benefit].” However, there is more difficulties inside the project team to agree on what constitute the content of a user story. In this blog post, Steve Johnson explores this issue.
An old project management quote says “You can’t control what you can’t measure”. This is not different when you use Scrum. In this blog post, David Koontz proposes a list of metrics that can be used to assess the activity of Scrum teams.
Agile and Scrum project teams can adopt many different structures. In her blog post, Elizabeth Harrin gives a good summary of five structures that could be used by Agile teams based on a presentation made by Catherine Powell at the Oredev conference.
Technical debt a metaphor that refers to the eventual consequences of poor or evolving software architecture and software development within a codebase. The technical debt can be defined of as work that needs to be done to adapt a software to the best practices. In this blog post, Bastian Buch explains the step used in his organisation to reduce technical debt in an Agile way.
Collaborative risk management brings many benefits to Scrum teams, notably by generating wiser decisions and creating a collective ownership of issues. In his blog, Mike Griffiths describes some collaborative games that can be use project risk management.
A sprint goal is defined as the desired outcome of an iteration. The sprint goal provides a shared objective and represents the reason for undertaking the sprint. In this blog post, Roman Pichler explains what sprint goals are, why they matter, how to write and to track them.