This article discusses the the role of the Product Owner in moving a backlog item to done. It explores how to achieve the productivity benefits of an up-front enabling specification, given the reality that Scrum is an empirical framework in which emergent understanding of the story under development is inherent.

LeanKit and Focused Objective announced a partnership to provide customers with an integrated product offering. The combined solution will bring industry leading quantitative analysis to LeanKit’s and Focused Objective’s customer base in an easy to use and immediately available way. This analysis includes forecasting project delivery dates, pinpointing what factors such as staffing, quality, scope change, etc. are having the greatest impact on delivery dates, and the ability to find what staff skill additions will have the most impact.

Trac is an open source enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects. Trac uses a minimalist approach to web-based software project management. It provides an interface to version control systems (Subversion, Git, Mercurial, …), an integrated Wiki and convenient reporting facilities. As many open source project, Trac has a plugin architecture that allows to extend the core functionalities. Here is a list of Scrum and Agile oriented plugins available in the Trac ecosystem.

Matthew Evans shares with us an Excel spreadsheet that allows to record and visualize informations about your Scrum sprint. One sheet allows to manage the sprint data with the estimated and actual work for each story. A project page consolidate the sprints data at a project level.  Visit the “Agile scrum project management spreadsheet” page to get the spreadsheet.

The Scrum of Scrums is the key for scaling large, multidimensional projects that cross departments, teams, and traditional boundary lines so that can be managed using the same protocols and logic of a fundamental, small-team project. Bryan Zarnett explains that where most ScrumMasters fail in this large-scale environment is in the nuances of communicating and coordinating multiple teams. The same tool set used to run a small Scrum team cannot be used for a collective of teams. He defines the role of an Agile Program Manager (APM) that will coordinate …

Are you using Scrum? Can you do better? This video examines essential coaching strategies and techniques for improving your Scrum Teams and how to take the first step in igniting change. It walks you through ways to coach change and most importantly ways to sustain this change and make a lasting impact.

Most of us do the exercise of rating team members every year even if we know that software is built by teams, not individuals. Moreoever, each individual needs to actively collaborate to produce quality software. This means that everyone on the team needs to take collective ownership and help each other, because the motive is not to be a hero but to build an end product of the utmost quality and predictability.

Principles from the Agile Manifesto have been used rapidly throughout industry on software development projects at first, and eventually into projects that are not software centric. This article focuses on the application of Scrum to enable stability for the execution of systems engineering (SE) activities at Boeing and the development of requisite systems engineering work products throughout the product development lifecycle.