In this blog post, Matt Archer shares his definition of the Agile Test Lead role and what he thinks they should contribute to Scrum teams. He says that behind the practical aspects of the Agile Test Lead role, there are also subtle connotations of coaching in this position. In his opinion, it is this coaching element that makes many Agile Test Leads valuable for the Scrum team they belong to.
Thom Roach shares with us in this blog post the metrics that he includes in iteration summary reports. The three main statistics he uses are Iteration Statistics summary, Iteration Cumulative Flow and Team Velocity Chart.
This podcast interviews Rini van Solingen about scrum and agile software development in distributed settings where the team is spread across different locations, different buildings or even different countries and continents.
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.
Mike Cohn wrote an interesting post where he discusses he allows or even encourages to estimate with story points as large as 20, 40, and 100. He explains that they are useful when you need first and not necessarily precise estimate of the general size of a new project being considered.
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.
The topic of Managing Risk in Scrum projects is addressed by Valerie Morris in these two blog posts. The first part discusses the five risk areas found on most software projects: intrinsic schedule flaw, specification breakdown, scope creep, personnel loss and productivity variance. The second part compares risk management practices between traditional project management and Scrum.
Scrum Expert Copyright © 2009-2026 Martinig & Associates