Agile Fundamentals

Breaking Free from the Traditional Approach: Agile Estimation Techniques for Better Project Management

How to break free from the traditional way of estimation in projects with the help of Agile estimation techniques and principles? Estimation is a widespread practice that businesses impose a significant emphasis on. Businesses include the estimation in their processes as a must-have part. Typical reasons for the estimation include the following: To understand the [...]

Frequently Asked: Story points in team of experts

Should you use story points for a team of developers developing multiple systems? The situation This question was asked by scrum masters who's teams are not ideal agile teams as the company introduces agile in multiple steps. Their team typically consists of experts focused on web, ledger, back- ends PHP / Java. They are [...]

Don’t give KO to your OKR: 25 don‘ts and 5 do’s

Review your OKR Company Objectives and key results (OKR) impact more people than just the development teams, they affect everyone working in or with the company. In theory, coming up with good OKR might seem easy enough, but when you start using them in real life, writing the right OKR becomes very complicated. [...]

ScrumImpulz conference on Agile practices on May 27th in Slovakia – CANCELED

UPDATE: We are very sorry to inform you that due to safety concerns regarding the spread of coronavirus we decided to cancel the #ScrumImpulz 2020. For more information please visit the ScrumImpulz Conference pages. We thank you for your continuous support and look forward to seeing you in 2021. Stay safe. International Conference [...]

February 13th, 2020|Categories: All, Events|Tags: , , |

Kudo cards: The Tool for Motivation and Retrospective

Being agile means receiving feedback, accepting it and changing. To get feedback you probably do retrospective once a sprint, but there are other activities that can provide ideas at any time, motivate and “spice up” your retro all at once. We’re talking about Kudo cards.   Kudo cards is a technique described in Management 3.0 [...]

What is Minimum Viable Product

Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a frequently used word today in development. For a Product Owner it is one of the foundations of Agile and a successful product. However, are you sure you know what MVP is and how it differs from the minimum marketable product (MMP)? Many people mistake or misuse these terms. Even when [...]

Why are Agile Manifesto Principles so important?

On Agile briefly Agile methods are methods that apply iterative and evolutionary development. 12 agile principles employ adaptive planning, promote incremental delivery, and include other values and practices that encourage agility. What does that really mean for software development? What are the implications for daily business? Let's analyze these principles and see where this [...]

April 8th, 2019|Categories: Agile Knowledge Hub, All|Tags: |

Progress Measurement in Agile Product Management

Oh, that great idea once again. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%. Apparently, the feature is 79% done. Round of applause, that’s a nice number. Nicer than 78%. Masturpercentobation. But what Jeff has to do with that, yes, that user Jeff. Team: ‘Ugh nothing we can do now, we have to wait 3 weeks for the next sprint release.’ Product [...]

Definition of Ready example from a real-life

The Definition of Ready helps save a lot of money on development for little effort. Or, why define requirements properly. The Punkers team The Punkers have been the worse team for a client and their management for several years now. Their requirements are constantly stretched, and even if they can be completed, the client [...]

Too many requirements. Just too many…

Lots of requirements. Lots and lots and lots A story about what will your ‘Yes’ answer cause in the long run. Lots of work. If it was about fire being once here and once there. But the fire burns always, everywhere and every single day. We develop a number of system customizations and our app [...]

How to build a great agile team when everybody is an expert?

Yet another week of mentoring is over, the next team is ready and another one prepared. This time it was, as always, quite unique and interesting. As I always say. We met a new team of people, working in a successful company and even though they’ve been sat in the same room for more [...]

Who is Product Owner? The Product Owner Role description

Chooses the right things. Many customers of our consultancy services ask us for some brief and practical description of the role of the Product Owner. Here is our attempt to provide not just some theory, but some additional practical tips for this role as well. The Product Owner The Product Owner role is a [...]

Epical epic. Agile epic examples

What is an agile epic, what to use it for, and foremost how? Requirements. Small, large, technical, business, operational, and researchable. And above all, plenty of them. During four years of ScrumDesk development, we have more than 800 requirements in our backlog. And these are the only requirements that we have decided to implement [...]

Hey Scrum Master and Product Owner! Do not overdo it with perfectionism.

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 [...]

40 benefits of Agile vs. traditional approaches

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 [...]

Please attend the sprint review. Make your sprint review great.

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 [...]

When to accept User Story

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 [...]

The checklist for your daily standup, part IV.: People & Company

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 [...]

Storypoints, hours or #noestimate?

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 are [...]

July 14th, 2017|Categories: Agile Knowledge Hub, All|Tags: , |

Daily stand-up checklist, part III.: Agreements, Definitions of Done & Ready

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 [...]

The Daily Standup Checklist, part II.

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 checklist for your daily standups, part I.

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 [...]

10 ScrumMaster’s Failures

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 [...]

ScrumDesk Roadmaps are here!

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 [...]

Agile Estimation: Principles

An estimation has been questioned in software development for many years. How to estimate accurately & fast? And, is an 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 training, [...]