Agile is no longer shiny and new. Many organizations claim that they’re Agile but what does that mean 10 years down the line of the Agile Manifesto? Sadly, what’s done in the name of Agile has strayed a long way from the original ideals. A bunch of simple practices that came from programmers have turned into tools for micro-management.
The Scrum Daily Stand-up meeting is certainly the most regular team activity in agile software development projects and there are therefore many material available on how to manage it and prevent it to become boring, useless or both. In this blog post, Anders Laestadius provides four ideas to improving the daily Scrum meeting.
The ScrumMaster is dealing daily to remove the issues that the team face. If he keeps in mind the role of the ScrumMaster as a servant leader, he will be better able to keep the team members motivated toward the goal, which will lead to better customer satisfaction in the end. On the other hand, if he follows the traditional role of a manager trying to ensure that he gets the work done, things may work out in the short term.
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.
The problem is not fixed price contracts. The problem is fixed scope contracts. This is what Mary Poppendieck thinks of agile fixed price contracts. Instead of a scope, we need is a short list of problems to be solved, not a bad amateur design of their solutions. Agile contracts leave solution design to software engineers and control projects through the regular delivery of measurable value.
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.
In this blog post, Pawel Brodzinski discusses the problem of the Product Role in Scrum teams. It is not always possible of having a client representative working closely with a project team. So the team should sometimes find other ways to get answer questions about the product and fill the product ownership activity. His conclusion is that knowing what is important to build is the essence of product ownership. A good Product Owner is only one way to achieve this objective.
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