Project charter discussions and documentation focuses traditionally on project scope and the goals and objectives for the project. To address specificity of Agile project, the author of this article has recently created and successfully utilized an Agile Development Team Charter. It differs from usual project charter as it focuses more on the ‘how’ of the project.
Alistair Cockburn describes software development as a cooperative game. Scrum provides one set of rules for one such way of playing the game. The Scrum Guide is the official rule book. However, the Scrum Guide doesn’t tell you the rationale behind Scrum as a whole, or behind many of its successful practices. Those rationales come out of experience, community, and the insights of its founders and inventors. The ScrumPLoP mission is to build a body of pattern literature around those communities, describing those insights, so we can easily share them with the Scrum and Agile communities.
We would like solutions delivered fast without compromising quality, user experience, implicit requirements and non-functional aspects such as scalability and performance. This would have been easier, if we had all the time in the universe. Doing this in a sustainable manner becomes a huge challenge for teams as there are multiple competing forces at play and because software development is very complex.
This article discusses the challenges that Agile brings to the appraisal process. Agile methodology focuses on team performance more than on the individual. The objectives of the team aren’t easily broken down by individual; one cannot appraise the individual on the basis of team performance. This article presents a workable solution for appraising Scrum team members. This will address problems raised while remaining within the Agile framework and philosophy. If a team is self-organizing, per the Agile framework, we can empower that team to raise itself to a “self-appraising team.”
Microsoft uses Scrum internally as most Agile teams do. Take a serious look at this framework for managing complex projects, such as software development. This video shows how to implement Scrum in Team Foundation Server (TFS) using the Visual Studio Scrum template, new Agile project management tools and related best practices. We create and manage a product backlog, forecast and plan our work for a Sprint and manage our Sprint tasks using the new tools in TFS.
This is an interesting interview of Ward Cunningham that talks about technical debt. Ward Cunningham was the first to drew a comparison between technical complexity and debt in 1992. In this interview, he talks, amongst other topics, about the relationship between technical debt and developer experience or when accumulation of debt is a good thing.
As Scrum teams should be self-managed and self-organized, they need empowerment, because without it, it is difficult for self-management and self-organization to happen. In this article, Jerry Rajamoney shares that the high-priority impediment item he has repeatedly faced as a ScrumMaster and struggled to solve is empowering the team. He gives four situations that could be considered as signals of lack of empowerment. He also notices that some issue come from the fact that managers are often asked to play the role of product owner or ScrumMaster, which creates confusion between the organizational role and their Scrum team role. A solution to these issues is proposed.
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