Articles on Scrum and Agile Project Management
As there is no all-size fits all software development process, even Scrum practitioners can learn some tricks from Rational Unified Process (RUP) for implementing more effective the customer’s requirements. The iterations from RUP can help stabilize the agile approach and offer increasing predictability of the developed software, future architecture and spent budget while keeping the flexibility toward client’s requests, development team buy-in and involvement, and the incremental delivery of the developed system.
Agile software development challenges traditional project management approaches with self-organizing teams where individual members have more influences on the project success. How do you hire Scrum team member in this type of context. Mitch Lacey proposes to adopt the immersive interviewing technique to hire for agile software development teams. And like all good agile practices, it begins and ends with the team.
Modern Agile software development approaches like Scrum recommend a “just in time” vision of application development that tends to make people focus only on the activities that are directly useful for the current sprint. How can you include an activity with a long-term perspective like enterprise software architecture in the iterative process of Scrum?
In a Scrum context, the definition of a “spike” is “a story or task aimed at answering a question or gathering information, rather than at producing shippable product.” In this article, Bill Ambrosini discusses how to manage them and when to use this activity.
Backlog refinement is an important part of the Scrum team activity as it allows to gain a shared understanding of the work flow. Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) is a technique that use a business language to define acceptance testing (test cases) of requirements. In this article, Zia Malik explains how teams can use BDD to support product backlog refinement.
The Definition of Done is an agreement between the Scrum team and the product owner on a minimum quality barrier for the product that’s being built. Establishing a minimum quality barrier has much wider implications than just better quality product, although that is one outcome of having a Definition of Done. This article is about the impact of a definition of done on the types of contract that Agile teams work with.
Running continuously sprint retrospectives while keeping the Scrum team awareness during this activity is one of the biggest challenge for ScrumMasters. In this article, Marc Nazarian present an game called “Turn the tables” that should help the ScrumMaster to achieve this objective.