Blogs on Scrum and Agile Project Management
Pair Programming is an Extreme Programming (XP) practice where two developers collaborate on the same code on one workstation. In this blog post, Yan Pritzker provides an experience report after his first nine months of pair programming. On the positive side of pair programming, he lists quick knowledge transfer, improved productivity and higher quality code. The disadvantage of this practice are a tired voices, difficulty to research and learn, need for space for creative activities, longer time spent on trivial tasks, possible issues with sharing the same configuration for the development environment. His conclusion is that “pairing coupled with an extremely pragmatic approach to knowing when not to pair is the key to success.”
This short blog post by Len Lagestee provides some advice on how to coach a ScrumMaster with a struggling team. You first observe and ask questions to the ScrumMaster to understand the situation. Based on his answers, you can assess your options and determine if you need to teach, mentor or encourage him.
In this blog post, Ilan Goldstein shares a list of things to do for successful Scrum sprint reviews, both before and during the meeting. Amongst the important points mentioned, there is the management of expectations, the brief mention of the impediments and improvements of the team. He also discusses the pressure to show “almost finished” user stories, how to deal with off topics questions or remarks and how to balance the fun and serious feelings that sprint reviews should convey.
Technical debt is the consequence of poor or evolving software architecture and software development within a codebase. The debt can be thought of as work that needs to be done before a particular job can be considered complete. In this blog post, Bastian Buch proposes an agile approach to reduce technical debt. He first declares that technical debt hasn’t improve through agile development methods and principles, but only gained some visibility.
Scrum Retrospectives are not easy and this meeting is often the first one that will be canceled when there is some pressure to deliver a product. In this blog post, Mitch Lacey explains why retrospectives are so important in Scrum. He presents also some key components of an effective retrospective in a Scrum / Agile project and how to organize a retrospective meeting.
User stories are the foundations of the Scrum sprints as they would allow you to work on the right things. Charles Bradley provides a lot of interesting material about crafting good user stories in his Scrum Crazy blog. In a blog post he starts by discussing what a user story is and go right to the point is saying that a user story is NOT a “As a I want so that”. For him, a user story is more than this and should consist of three parts: 1) a written description or short title of the story used as a token for planning and as a reminder to have conversations, 2)conversations about the story that has the details of the story, 3)acceptance tests that that can be used to determine when a story is done.
There are several techniques that can be used to promote communication in a Scrum team, like for instance the Dialogue Sheets that are proposed by Allan Kelly for retrospectives. In this blog post, Alan Dayley discusses how silence is a powerful tool for management and the need for constructive conflict.
