People and team member management for Agile project management and Scrum software development teams.
There might exist some lonely standalone software developers that create software without any other person involved, but my guess is that there are not many of them. Communication is an essential skill in software development, testing and project management… and life. As feedback is a key communication tool, I was therefore very interested when I stumble on this book about feedback written by an Agile coach.
The ScrumMaster role might be the most difficult to define among the three roles involved in the Scrum team. Starting from a “bad” ScrumMaster job description, Agile coach Sam Laing discusses in this article the errors to avoid when you create a Scrum Master role specification. As a bonus, she provides at the end a good ScrumMaster job description.
Building great teams isn’t just something that managers do alone, with spreadsheets and workflows and process documents. Great teams come from the participation of the group to push the team there. This presentation discusses how you can think about your role in creating a high-performance team, whatever your job title is.
The Manifesto for Agile Software Development says that you should prefer “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”. But how do you hire the right people for your Scrum software development projects. In her article “Hiring for Agility – Mindset Matters in an Agile Organisation”, Nadia Smith suggests that you should look for more for Agility than Agile.
‘Agile’ is an incredibly powerful software development methodology, however the word ‘agile’ has become one of those IT buzzwords that people use but do not fully understand.
As stated in the Agile Manifesto, Agile software development is about “Individuals and interactions”. The importance of having a performing team where individuals collaborate is an essential factor for the success of software development projects. In his “Forming Agile Teams Workbook”, Jesus Mendez provides some tools that offer an alternative-proven way to add more structure, transparency and visibility to formation of Agile teams.
Using an Agile approach for software development does not necessarily guarantee success. As Henrik Kniberg wrote at the beginning of his blog post ” Even if the entire organization is neatly organized into scrum teams, you can still end up with an unaligned mess!”. Having an Agile leader can help preventing the unaligned mess.
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