7 Reasons Why You Don’t Get to Done
In this article, Faisal Mahmood discusses seven reasons why a Scrum team cannot get to done at the end of a sprint. In Scrum, “done” is often defined as producing a potentially shippable product.
Agile & Scrum Articles
Articles on Scrum and Agile Project Management
Enacting Scrum in Visual Studio
In this excerpt of their book, Sam Guckenheimer and Neno Loje describes the mechanisms that Visual Studio (primarily Team Foundation Server [TFS]) provides to support the team enacting an Agile process. This article provides an inside-out overview of what makes the enactment of Agle possible in Visual Studio.
Increasing Project Team Productivity
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.
Managing the Complexity of Component Teams
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.
Making the Sprint Backlog Ready for Testing
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.
Servant Leadership for the ScrumMaster
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.”
Release Planning Value
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.