Making decisions in groups like Scrum teams is our daily bread. Together we ponder over the right architecture, we select tools and set rules that we should follow as a software development team. In case of errors we discuss and decide how to get rid of them once and for all. We discuss, exchange point of views, bring arguments… or even yell at each other.
If delivering business value should be the main goal of a software development project, not all the developers’ activities are contributing to this objective. In his book ” Scrum Shortcuts without Cutting Corners”, Ilan Goldstein discusses how you should deal with bugs and the technical aspects of your software project.
Agile is a now mainstream method used in IT project management. Yes, Agile and Scrum are now considered as a method and no longer as a philosophy. Everyone wants to “do” Agile and thus want to “be” Agile as well, but what are the common mistakes in applying Agile?
There’s a debate raging in the Agile world around the #NoEstimate concept: should we estimate, or not? Lost in the noise are more important questions: When should we estimate, and why? When should we not estimate, and why not?
The product owner is a very important component in a Scrum team, as it is the force driving the team towards the satisfaction of the end-user needs. This is a different situation if you are in a small startup or responsible for a large, established product line. In this blog post, Roman Pichler discusses the differences between small and big product owners.
One of the most important, and often overlook, sentence in the principles of the Agile Manifesto is “continuous delivery of valuable software”. Delivering value is an important principle for Agile and prioritization is the tool that allows to deliver value quickly. This is the topic discussed by Daniel Zacarias in his article “20 Product Prioritization Techniques: A Map and Guided Tour”.
How much does one story point cost? Is Sprint 0 an expense or an asset? Can you run Scrum with a fixed-cost contract? Agile challenges the existing approach to financial aspects of running projects, that is budgeting, forecasting, financial planning and vendor contracts.
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