Main category for blog posts…
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 [...]
Trainer: Zuzi Šochová Date: 6-7 November 2017 Location: Bratislava, Slovakia NOTE: Please note that this training will be in English. CSPO - Certified Scrum Product Owner Course - is trained by Scrum Alliance certified trainer CST and you will definitely enjoy it. We look at Scrum from the Product Owner's point of view, covering several concepts on how to create [...]
Trainer: Zuzi Šochová Date: 23-24 November, 2017 Location: Bratislava, Slovakia Regular Price: 1200 EUR excluding VAT Early Price: 1000 EUR excluding VAT expires 23 October, 2017 NOTE: Please note that this training will be in English. CSM - Certified Scrum Master course is unique opportunity to look at Scrum from the ScrumMaster point of view. You will definitely enjoy it. [...]
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 [...]
Archive epic From this version, you can archive not just release, but epics as well. ScrumDesk is used by customers in multiple ways. Some customers prefer epics as long-term containers of user stories. This is especially useful for product development where epics represent bigger functionality. Some other customers prefer however epics as project phases [...]
Guest accounts for free Do you want to play fair & transparently in front of your clients, stakeholders, or managers? Invite them to your organization account and then assign them to projects as guests. Guests are able: to read everything, to actively comment tasks, be mentioned and notified via ScrumDesk. To invite guest just [...]
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 [...]
Roadmaps Editor Real start and end These fields are calculated based on the progress of nested backlog items once their subtask were started. New Delta fields They indicate how much late or earlier the feature has been developed comparing to plans specified in a roadmap. Other changes of the roadmap editor Even ScrumMaster can see [...]
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 [...]
Do you take care of the complex agile project developed with one or more scrum teams? Are your teams dislocated? Or do you manage product portfolio with the help of ScrumDesk? Now you can do scheduling of the project in ScrumDesk not just with releases or sprints. ScrumDesk Roadmaps are an easy way to plan and schedule [...]
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 [...]
ScrumDesk is available for more than three years already and many customers finished dozens of releases and sprints. Now is the best time to forget them! With this version, you can archive release, its sprints, and backlog items so they are not loaded anymore in BACKLOG, PLAN or WORK views. This will significantly increase performance. [...]
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 teams track their tasks on a Kanban board that visualize the status of work with help of multiple columns. Every column means some status. The team member should move task cards between these statuses to indicate on which task he works. Which tasks have been done and which still need to be developed. [...]
What you see on the picture below is a new functionality of ProductDesk module with designer of roadmaps. We are preparing it for the next major release and it is going to be huge, very huge, very, very very huge. Popular sentence these days :) It is going to be available as a free upgrade [...]
The change of our pricing plan has been communicated in October the last year. ScrumDesk's pricing plan is now a combination of the monthly subscription fees for user licenses and one-time payment for selected modules. On March 5th we will start to issue monthly invoices for accounts with more than 4 free user licenses [...]
The latest version of ScrumDesk suite allows you to pay for user licenses and to buy additional packages directly from the application. VISA/MasterCard/Diners Club cards are accepted. Move subtask to other backlog items Until this version, it was possible to move subtask to other backlog item displayed on Kanban board in WORK view. Now you [...]
