Analyzing the bottleneck faced by a Scrum team, Mark Levison introduces in this blog post the concept of Skills Matrix. The Skill Matrix is a visual management tool that shows at a glance how much cross-training you have in your organization between different people and different tasks.
Learn how you can improve your business analysis with Agile story mapping, a technique that maps your stories back to business value. Thus you will be able to know if they make or save the company money and you will learn the benefits of bi-directional requirements traceability .
In this article, Elton Gao starts by giving us the definition of a good ScrumMaster: someone who knows Scrum well. He or she understands the do’s and don’ts and is familiar with related artifacts and tools. He or she knows how to run a daily Scrum, a planning/review/retrospective meeting and how to take advantages of related tools and so on. But is this enough?
The Scrum checklist is a simple tool that provides guidelines to assess your current implementation of Scrum or help you adopting it. Created by Henrik Kniberg, the author of “Scrum from the Trenches”, they incorporate his experience gained during years helping companies getting started with Scrum and many meetings with other practitioners, trainers and Scrum coaches.
The “rightsizing” of user stories occurring during the planning of the next sprint in Scrum is not always an easy task to perform. Inexperienced teams have difficulties to split user stories into smaller chunks that still deliver business value and would rather use technical criteria. In this blog post, “Specifications by Example” author Gojko Adzic provides a new approach to achieve this goal using the hamburger as a reference. You identify the tasks making up a user story. Then you use this breakdown to identify different levels of quality for each step and create vertical slices to identify smaller deliverables, thus creating your next sprint’s hamburger.
During Scrum adoption, people tend to get away from tasks and activities that they don’t like in traditional projects like documentation or writing proper code comments. In this article, a ScrumMaster shares his experience with a “no documentation” approach. He learned the hard way that minimal documentation is better than no documentation in Scrum projects. The team can decide on a case-by-case basis what level of documentation for which components and code logics is needed.
Should you track individual performances in Scrum and how do you do it? Nanda Vivek says that there is only one answer and this is “No”. Measuring individual productivity is against the spirit of Scrum and the article discusses the importance of being helpful and collaborative in teams. The author however does not give guideline on how to deal in this case with the individual review that is a common practice in many large organizations.
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