Articles on Scrum and Agile Project Management
This article from Rob Maher focuses on how to increase productivity. It discusses how changing a project staffing model could increase the productivity of project teams (PDF document). There is published evidence that short-lived groups of people brought together for a project are correlated with lower productivity. His view is that in an agile world, teams are permanent and the organization optimizes at the team level. Permanent teams enable consistent estimation, which is not possible using the matrix approach.
Scrum teams usually develop iteratively new product features. In larger project, teams can also be organized around layers or components of the product. In this article, Mukesh Chaudhary discusses how to manage the complexity with Scrum component teams and integration of their deliverables to make up a feature.
In his article “Creating an ATDD Ready Sprint Backlog in Scrum“, Ralph Jocham discusses the requirements definition in Scrum and how examples allows the team to better understand them. As the backlog is now also expressed in terms of business requirements, each team member can easily focus on the bigger picture during the Scrum stand-up meeting and align with the ‘why’. If you translate the business-facing examples into automated tests, it enables the team to verify during the Sprint that the software increment always meets the evolving requirements towards the Definition of Done and the overall goal.
This article by Badri Srinivasan discusses the important notion of team leadership in Scrum and how the ScrumMaster should be a Servant Leader for the Scrum team. The article presents the principles of Servant Leadership. This is a philosophy and practice of leadership that is defined as “a management philosophy which implies a holistic view of the quality of people, work and community spirit. A servant leader is someone who is servant first and who contributes to the well-being of people and community.”
In this article, Vaidhyanathan Radhakrishnan discusses about the value of release planning in Scrum. This is the tool to schedule timelines for a project or a product in a complex environment where the outcome of one team is required for the other teams. The article proposes an approach to produce a release plan. This approach is based on the finding primary and secondary features in the product backlog. You can then determine whether the resources are adequate and what interdependencies exist to adjust the feature layout. The article presents the advantages of a release plan and the common disadvantages of this situation, like including ongoing or generic activities spread across the timelines which dilutes the focus of the plan.
In this article, Steve Hunton explains that, even if people expect that the shift to Agile practices includes a wholesale shift of roles,, the ScrumMaster does not play the part of the traditional project manager. He thinks that the project manager role is more filled by the product owner. The project manager is a decision maker accountable to the business for accomplishing the project objectives. The ScrumMaster is a coach and facilitator that sits between the project and the customer. He isn’t responsible for the project or managing the development team. If you have questions about the product, then you should ask it to the product owner. He concludes that if the ScrumMaster is making decisions about a product, then Scrum has not been properly implemented and there’s going to be confusion and conflict about who does and owns what.
Developers don’t like to provide time estimates for implementing a software feature. Management, on the other hand, has a legitimate need for project management estimates. This article explains how the Scrum Agile Project Management framework provides a solution to this conflict.
