Articles, Blog Posts, Books and Quotes on Agile Project Management
Agile is about giving responsibility to the people, and self-organization is one of the way this is achieved. Agile is also about continuous improvement and adaptation. To follow this journey, the Scrum teams need to assess how they are doing and where they should improve. In this article, Ben Linders discusses Agile self-assessments and how they can support the continuous improvement process to an Agile mindset.
If some consider Scrum as an Agile project management framework, many people consider that is is more a product management approach. Anyway, Scrum is about understanding the need of the customers to deliver value. In this context, the concept of “personas” can be used to support user-centered design throughout a product development cycle by focusing on the characteristics of key user segments.
Even if the Scrum framework is simple and easy to describe, there are still many cases were organizations fail in adopting Scrum. One of the main reasons is that many companies see the transformation towards Agile as a simple change in the process and not the adoption of new values. In this article, Zuzi Šochová explains that you cannot just do Scrum, you have to be Scrum.
Retrospectives are an important tool for Agile software development teams to support continuous improvement. One of the challenge is to maintain their efficiency when this activity is repeated again and again. To achieve better results, Scrum Masters will diversify the type of formats, but this might not solve the issue. In this article, Colleen Johnson proposes an approach that focuses instead on the type of data collected to improve the outcome of your retrospectives.
The ScrumMaster role is certainly the Scrum role that differs the most from what organizations might have known in the past. The Scrum Guide defines the Scrum Master as “a servant-leader for the Scrum Team. The Scrum Master helps those outside the Scrum Team understand which of their interactions with the Scrum Team are helpful and which aren’t. The Scrum Master helps everyone change these interactions to maximize the value created by the Scrum Team.”
In an ideal Agile world, the Scrum team is always completing all the selected user stories at the end of the sprint. In the real world however, there might be some product backlog items that don’t have a “done” status, but are only partially finished. Should you split them for the next sprint? In this article, Daniel Zacharias gives you four reasons why it is a bad idea to split unfinished product backlog items.
User stories are one of the main format to record user needs in the Agile world. There is however a debate on the amount of information that should be available to the Scrum team before starting the sprint. In this article, Zuzi Šochová recommends to minimize the size of user stories and to define simple conditions of satisfaction instead of writing acceptance criteria.
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