Articles and videos on creating and managing cross-functional Scrum teams: scrum master, product owner and development team.
As Scrum teams should be self-managed and self-organized, they need empowerment, because without it, it is difficult for self-management and self-organization to happen. In this article, Jerry Rajamoney shares that the high-priority impediment item he has repeatedly faced as a ScrumMaster and struggled to solve is empowering the team. He gives four situations that could be considered as signals of lack of empowerment. He also notices that some issue come from the fact that managers are often asked to play the role of product owner or ScrumMaster, which creates confusion between the organizational role and their Scrum team role. A solution to these issues is proposed.
Even if the Scrum daily stand-up meeting isn’t a status report, it is often easy for team members to slip into a pattern of providing status-related information. In this article, Eric King proposes different techniques that you can integrate in your daily stand-up meting to get more value out of it, setting a positive tone for the daily activities as people grow both as individuals and as a team. These techniques are Speed Scrum, Pass-the-Conch Scrum, Time-Box Scrum, Challenge Scrum, Impediments-Only Scrum, Award Scrum, Business Value-Focused Scrum, No-Board Scrum, Whiteboard Scrum and Buddy Scrum. Being able to overcome and adapt lies at the core of Scrum team. The stand-up is an essential part of our Agile/Scrum process, but team members should constantly seekg new ways to challenge each other. Even if you still use the proven stand-up approach, you can have great success in periodically spicing it up with the methods above. You will get the job done, but you will also find that a little laughter at the beginning of the day can set a great tone.
Scrum likes to rely the technical practices recommended by eEXtreme Programming to improve the software quality. Pair programming is one of these practices, even if surveys tell us that it is not used as much as other practices like test-driven development (TDD). In this article, Zee Spencer shares four common pitfalls of pair programming and tell us how to avoid them.
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.
One of the first steps in an Agile adoption is the formation and organization of agile teams. Leadership often struggles to figure out how many people should be on each team, what skill sets should included, and whether the team should be focused on solution components, feature delivery, or a mix.
An Agile team reset occurs when an Agile team take a step back to review and relearn the foundation principles and practices of Scrum. Justin Hennessy presents in this article how he did it when a team he was coaching had successfully implemented the practices for Scrum but didn’t really understand the values or principles behind it.
Analyzing the bottleneck faced by a Scrum team, Mark Levison introduces in this blog post the concept of Skills Matrix. The Skill Matrix is a visual management tool that shows at a glance how much cross-training you have in your organization between different people and different tasks.
