How often did you meet a situation when everybody knows about an issue, at retrospective everybody agrees that it should be resolved, but next retrospective brings the same issue and the same action items? Why team of mature developers cannot change a situation on a project, cannot apply new practices or fail to apply innovations? Let me explain it on real project example and get you to the root cause, go from best practices to basic principles and back.
User stories and their format defined by Mike Cohn “As a , I want so that .” are a classical way to record requirements in Scrum project. In his blog post, Alan Klement discusses a new format that he called “Job Stories” with the format “When … , I want to … , so I can … .”
One of the principles of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development is that you should “Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.” Mickey Mantle and Ron Lichty give some advice in their book on how to facilitate when you are the manager of a self-organized Scrum team.
You have been doing Agile and Scrum for a few years now. With a regular cadence you have retrospectives and a lot of problems and great improvement opportunities are raised but nothing seems to really improve. Stop doing retrospectives!
User stories and their size are often the basis for planning a Sprint in Scrum. You can use a relative estimation and planning poker or a more classical approach to define the effort for each user stories. As such, they are also the basis for the metrics of progress and the velocity of the Scrum team.
This article discusses the differences between quality assurance and software testing. If the developer uses techniques like TDD to prove that his program can work, you shouldn’t ask him to prove the opposite. This article advocates having a separate software testing function, even if you are using an Agile software development approach like Scrum.
There are a lot of teams out there who started their transition to agile/lean quite a while ago. Most of them did some great steps in the right direction. But after the first view month, after all of the low hanging fruits were harvested, most of the teams struggle with establishing a valuable and sustaining kaizen culture of continuous improvement using retrospectives.
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