In a Scrum context, the definition of a “spike” is “a story or task aimed at answering a question or gathering information, rather than at producing shippable product.” In this article, Bill Ambrosini discusses how to manage them and when to use this activity.
It is fairly hard to know what solid software testing is all about within Agile and Scrum teams. What traditional software testing practices are fine to continue, which ones need modification and what totally new approaches are necessary. Moving from traditional testing to agile testing is often a high-wire balancing act to some degree with no clear direction.
Backlog refinement is an important part of the Scrum team activity as it allows to gain a shared understanding of the work flow. Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) is a technique that use a business language to define acceptance testing (test cases) of requirements. In this article, Zia Malik explains how teams can use BDD to support product backlog refinement.
Klaus Bucka-Lassen discusses the estimation with story points in Scrum. Story points are a different way to estimate features in Scrum. Story points are a measurement of a feature’s size relative to other features and not a measure of the time needed to complete a feature.
The Definition of Done is an agreement between the Scrum team and the product owner on a minimum quality barrier for the product that’s being built. Establishing a minimum quality barrier has much wider implications than just better quality product, although that is one outcome of having a Definition of Done. This article is about the impact of a definition of done on the types of contract that Agile teams work with.
Running continuously sprint retrospectives while keeping the Scrum team awareness during this activity is one of the biggest challenge for ScrumMasters. In this article, Marc Nazarian present an game called “Turn the tables” that should help the ScrumMaster to achieve this objective.
The metaphor of technical debt is widely used in software project management in general and especially Scrum. This article written by Philippe Kruchten, Robert L. Nord and Ipek Ozkaya try to put this concept in perspective, discussing how it has become somewhat diluted lately with its extension to other areas than code or its associations with tools like static code analyzers.
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