Agile and Scrum short iterations should provide software development organization with quicker feedback cycles and help them shifting from building the product right to building the right product. In their book “The Lean Mindset”, Mary and Tom Poppendieck provides an original perspective on this issue.
For best results from Agile, you need a solid team. If you belong to, manage, or lead an Agile team, you’ve probably seen that process alone doesn’t translate to great results – and that having a cross-functional group of 7 +/- 2 “resources” doesn’t either. Instead, what makes Agile come to life is the team’s motivated, engaged individuals who communicate, collaborate, and respond effectively. In many organizations, teams rely on their leaders and managers to help them grow and become stronger.
The first value of the Agile Manifesto is to prefer “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”. But how can you know if your individuals and your teams like your current Agile approach. In his article, Henrik Kniberg present a simple tool to assess the health of your Scrum teams.
Carbon Five has been using Agile XP from our very beginnings 14 years ago. Six years ago we started on a deep dive into Design Thinking inspired by collaborations with the Stanford d.school. We then extended those learnings, integrating Lean UX techniques, to help our clients focus the team’s development power in a direction more closely aligned to a viable product market fit.
The product backlog might be the more important item for a Scrum team as it represents the business value that the project should deliver to its customers. Putting a priority on the features and user stories is however not always easy for the product owners, especially if they are dealing with multiple stakeholders. In this article, Samantha Laing shares a technique that can help to improve the results of this activity.
A product roadmap is a high-level plan that shows how a product is likely to grow over time. This creates a continuity of purpose, aligns stakeholders and facilitates prioritisation. Unfortunately, many product owners and teams struggle with their product roadmaps. The roadmaps are often dominated by features, and the features are sometimes regarded as a commitment by senior management.
In large Agile projects where a Scrum team cannot deliver the full system, you have different options to organize your team. You can use feature teams that work on a set of user stories or component teams that work on a subsystem or component. In his blog post, Michael Valenta reports his experience as a ScrumMaster from the usage of features teams.
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