Articles on Scrum and Agile Project Management
You company is transitioning to Agile and you need to hire people that will bring this type of expertise to you teams. This article propose 10 questions that you could ask to assess the vision of Agile by the prospective employees. The questions are only the first step and the article also provides guidelines on how to interpret the answers. It asks for instance “Did your iterations overlap? For instance, were the testers still testing Iteration 6 while Iteration 5 was being designed/developed?” and then discussed the status of multidisciplinary teams. Even if the material is more geared towards large organizations, every agile manager will find valuable content in it.
Gunther Verheyen presents the the majors aspects of the distinct views of Lean and Agile, indicating the similarities. He elaborates on his statement that the houses of Lean and Scrum are similar houses, just built with different materials. His conclusion is that the open framework of Scrum aligns and blends the underlying thinking of Agile and Lean.
Epics are used to get a bigger picture of user stories, but we need another level of abstraction. We need to bring together the various Epics that describe how our solution will evolve to its final endpoint, and how different functional teams and specialists will interact.
Even if the the Agile Manifesto declares that you should value “individuals and interactions over processes and tools”, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use any tool. The authors of this article shares their experience using agile tools and explains why they prefer non-software tools and why you should be carefully pick the tools that will support your practice and your company if you pick any at all.
Have you worked on a distributed team where management apparently thought it should hobble local members to make everybody equally frustrated and ineffective? The Agile Manifesto principles say that: 1) Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project. 2) The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
This article describes a Lean and Scalable Requirements Information Model that extends the basic team‐based agile requirements practices to the needs of the largest, lean‐thinking software enterprise. While fully scalable to all levels of the project, program and portfolio levels, the foundation of the model is a quintessentially lean and agile subset in support of the agile project teams that write and test all the code.
This article presents the mechanisms that Visual Studio provides to support the team enacting an Agile process, primarily with Team Foundation Server (TFS). TFS captures backlogs, workflow, status and metrics of Scrum projects. This guides the users to the next appropriate actions. TFS also helps ensure the “done-ness” of work so that the team cannot accrue technical debt without warning and visibility.