Articles, Blog Posts, Books and Quotes on Agile Project Management
Developers don’t like to provide time estimates for implementing a software feature. Management, on the other hand, has a legitimate need for project management estimates. This article explains how the Scrum Agile Project Management framework provides a solution to this conflict.
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.
Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (TFS) is the collaboration platform at the core of Microsoft’s application lifecycle management solution. Scrum can be implemented in TFS using the Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 process template from Microsoft. This article provides 25 best practices to start using Scrum in a TFS context. This practices deal with all practical aspects of the Scrum framework : sprint estimation, backlog management, user stories management, meetings, etc.
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.
In this article, Davide Noaro discusses the software testing phase of Scrum projects with a final Waterfall interaction. As Scrum’s adoption is often incremental inside an organization, both approaches can coexist for a while. Compared to a full Scrum approach is that, in this situation you are obliged to rerun the tests for the whole functionality to qualify the product before going to production. In the article, he presents how software testing has been integrated into his organization’s process and then analyze the objections that are sometimes raised on the software testing choice made, mainly that running tests for every user story is inefficient because they have to rerun them for the whole functionality during the Waterfall at end phase.
The average Scrum team delivered a 35% improvement in velocity at Yahoo [1] where teams properly coached delivered 300-400% improvements. The best Scrum Master at MySpace peaked at 267% of initial velocity after 12 weeks and averaged 168% increase in velocity over 12 Sprints. Most teams were less successful.
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