Blogs on Scrum and Agile Project Management
Most of you should be familiar with Test-Driven Development (TDD), an Agile approach where you write a unit test before actually writing the code that should be verified. In this blog post, Jeffrey Davidson use the same concept and proposes a Test-Driven Retrospectives approach to ensure that this Scrum activity provides real improvements.
In this blog post, J.D. Meier shares his experience of leading high-performance distributed teams for more than ten years at Microsoft. He describes a weekly schedule that begins with identifying 3 wins for the week on Monday to discussing 3 things going well and 3 things to improve on Friday.
In this blog post, Jamie Arnold shares some of the lessons learned and benefits of scaling Agile at the Government Digital Service. It is a presentation about how to scale agile from one team of 12 people to 140 people and 14 teams.
In this blog post, Cory Foy explains how he recreated Scrum using Kanban coupled with a set of Explicit Policies. Kanban has less initial rules than Scrum, but the team decides with explicit policies how he wants to manage things like the frequency of the meetings with the backlog owner. The blog post describes the right set of explicit policies needed in Kanban to recreate Scrum. As Cory Foy says, this is a little bit a silly exercise, but it allows also to think about the implicit set of policies that Scrum proposes.
In this article, Gunther Verheyen explains that pair programming is a good software development practice. Even if Scrum doesn’t prescribe specific engineering practices, Scrum fully supports the agile principle that says “Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility”.
In a slightly provocatively titled “Why I’m done with Scrum” blog post, Jimmy Bogard provides four reasons reasons why he decided to abandon using Scrum to adopt a lean approach to software development.In his first two reasons, he discusses the inefficiencies of the iteration system.
In this blog post, Gunther Verheyen discusses how he quit the “ScrumBut” expressions to move to a “ScrumAnd” status. He shares with us a nine questions test to determine if you are doing Scrum, but beyond the mere crossing the line of ‘yes/no’ doing Scrum there is a myriad of possibilities to play Scrum, but he explains that the core practices presented in the test are at the core of the Scrum framework and that doing less is not doing Scrum. He suggests to use Scrum as a framework for Continuous Improvement and look for ways to measure it.