Story A: Joe I’ve known ever since high school. Incredibly nice, funny guy. The one you’d like to have in a team. Scrum was always an interesting topic for Joe and he’d read many books about it and showed a lot of interest. When I asked the team who'd wanted to be a Scrum [...]
Last year many people asked us about the benefits of Agile compared to traditional ways of creating products. Because of that we had a short brainstorming session and came up with this list of forty advantages of Agile: A customer gets value regularly even during the first weeks of development. Products are usable after [...]
Teamwork is a part of my professional life for the last 20 years. In roles from a team member, team leader, to manager and mentor I had an opportunity to observe different team setups as well as different team dynamics and how it influences the final result. I have always been curious about these [...]
In the last week, I attended a couple of sprint review sessions. Some of you maybe call them sprint demo. Ok, simply to say, the meeting at the end of the sprint where you are supposed to show your sprint's achievements. In my case, all sprint review sessions had something in common. People were [...]
How to balance business and technology requirements in a product backlog to build a successful product in long term. Product ownership is hard stuff. Very often you feel schizophrenia. Often you play for a customer, but later, suddenly, you have to protect your team. Sometimes you are pushed by the business, later by architects [...]
When is the best to accept the user story which is finished and who should accept them? In our Agile and Scrum Fundamentals training, people are (surprisingly) surprised when we present our approach of the acceptance of finished work. At the begging we often observe disagreements, but after a few minutes of an explanation why [...]
This article is the continuation of The Daily Stand-up Checklist for ScrumMasters, part III. The aim of this series of articles is to help ScrumMasters to prepare better for daily stand-up so it is efficient, productive and engaging. These tips are based on our observation of 100+ agile teams in their agile transformations. Daily standup and People Sickness? Vacation? ScrumMaster [...]
Sprint planning is one of the most important ceremonies in the Scrum project management method. Why run it and how? Even the Sprint planning ceremony doesn't seem to be complex, many Agile teams consider it a waste of time. "Let's develop something instead of loosing so much time in the sprint planning." This is [...]
How to choose the best estimation unit in an appropriate time. Should it be storypoints or hours? Or even #noestimates at all? In Agile meetups, we often hear very strong opinions about estimation units. From some perspective, it even sounds like a religion. I. Religion: Story points Most people express an opinion that hours [...]
The Agile company can be recognized by the presence of Kanban boards with index cards of user stories which are put into multiple columns based on their status. Such a board looks simple and easy to handle. For agile teams, this is very welcome due to a low level of bureaucracy, high transparency, and [...]
This article is the continuation of The Daily Stand-up Checklist for ScrumMasters, part II. The aim of this series of articles is to help Scrum Masters to prepare better for daily stand-up so it is efficient, productive and engaging. These tips are based on our observation of 100+ agile teams in their agile transformations. Agreements To get things working [...]
This article is the continuation of The Daily Stand-up Checklist for ScrumMasters, part I. The aim of this series is to help Scrum Masters to prepare better for daily stand-up so it is efficient, productive and engaging. These tips are based on our observation of 100+ agile teams in their agile transformations. In the first part, [...]
The daily standup meeting is a fundamental ceremony in Scrum. Even if you do not follow Scrum, it has a huge impact due to the transparency it brings. Most of the Agile teams and ScrumMasters think the daily standup ceremony is the easiest part of Scrum. Well, should it brings you the value, you want to do [...]
We see ScrumMasters fail very often while supporting agile teams in their agile transformations. Based on stories of more than one hundred of ScrumMasters we think that the following 10 ScrumMaster's failures are the top most important for agile teams. 1. Because of Agile People do not care about Agile or Scrum. They want [...]
In the first part about agile estimation, we explained the fundamental principles of the estimation. Now it is time to think about how to implement them in real life. Reference stories For estimation, we will need to have 'the catalog of references' so we can compare all new requirements fast & accurately enough. In our [...]
Estimation has been questioned in software development for many years. How can an estimate be made accurately and quickly? And is estimation even necessary? Well, that is the question for thousands of bucks. Because estimation might be expensive. Especially in the age of changes. Time as an estimation unit is wrong! In our agile [...]
Agile development works very well in the product development area. But to build a successful product is much more work than just gather requirements and implement them. One of the trickiest things in agile development is how to prepare requirements that are ready for incremental development while still delivering some value for the customers. [...]
The first blog post about prioritization was focused on MoSCoW - prioritization of the backlog from the perspective of customers. This is not enough for the products development of the commercial company. You need to survive, to pay bills, to pay the next sprints. You have to think about features from the perspective of the [...]
Prioritization is probably the most discussed part of development processes. Product backlogs are often quite complex with hundreds of requirements. How to find user stories in your story map which you should start developing first? Traditional approach The approach of traditional processes is simple. You have high, medium, low priorities. Ok, for some organizations [...]
Agile works very well in a product-oriented environment. It’s understandable, as Agile Manifesto as a key document of whole Agile stresses the functional product as one of the most important values. When implementing agile practices, Product development is very often reduced to: Description of responsibilities for Product Owner role, Request recording, Maintenance of backlogs, [...]
The last couple of weeks were incredibly intense for me. It´s been a long time since I was returning home doing mentoring exhausted to the level I barely could talk. In this case, even my natural ‘workaholics’ was of no help. It was my honor to work with a fresh team formed a just [...]
ScrumMaster is baking the daily bread on the daily stand-up. During these meetings his abilities and knowledge are uncovered. There is a possibility to pick up some useful information about the Scrum Mastership during the certification or specialized trainings but only trough real experience can you gain the deeper insight into the nature of [...]
The suggestions for this week are as follow: Top Five Tips for Starting Agile Talk: Jeff Lawson on Software Development Adopting Agile When Your Management Style is Mostly Command and Control Getting started with Acceptance-Test Driven Development
The suggestions for this week are as follow: The article on the importance of modeling in Agile times, especially when development is built on multiple teams and shared understanding 40 minutes long talk about the correlation between safety and success of agile methods, what to do towards the change of organizational culture and to [...]
Although Agile looks chaotic in practice at first glance, good agile teams take heed to the rules agreed upon in a team. Rules for the daily stand-up Rules for the daily stand-up should cover the following: Where will be the stand-up held? What time does the stand-up start? What is the duration of the [...]
We approached the reasons for the regular meetings of the team in the first post. Another issue ScumMaster should consider is where the daily stand-up would be held. This topic is obviously more important for the non-distributed teams. The stand-up that has taken place without any changes in a team room is the common mistake [...]
The daily stand-up is an essential Scrum ceremony that is (luckily) often applied without any further official formalization, especially in small companies where cooperation is still based on conversation. Suddenly these meetings turn down in intensity after several months. During our coaching, many people argue it is waste of time. Why is it so? [...]
As Agile is spreading more and more in the field, there is a bigger opportunity you can meet people who are involved in Agile for many years already. We at ScrumDesk appreciate a new project that helps you to recognize: who is who, what the story is behind that person, how can be given [...]
We see a lot of people in Europe eager to know more about Agile. We see people who would like to know what does it mean to be agile, how to start with it and how to evolve into an agile company. ScrumDesk company actively supports agile transition in the Central and Eastern Europe region [...]
