Articles on Scrum and Agile Project Management
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.
Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (TFS) is the collaboration platform at the core of Microsoft’s application lifecycle management solution. Scrum can be implemented in TFS using the Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 process template from Microsoft. This article provides 25 best practices to start using Scrum in a TFS context. This practices deal with all practical aspects of the Scrum framework : sprint estimation, backlog management, user stories management, meetings, etc.
In this article, Davide Noaro discusses the software testing phase of Scrum projects with a final Waterfall interaction. As Scrum’s adoption is often incremental inside an organization, both approaches can coexist for a while. Compared to a full Scrum approach is that, in this situation you are obliged to rerun the tests for the whole functionality to qualify the product before going to production. In the article, he presents how software testing has been integrated into his organization’s process and then analyze the objections that are sometimes raised on the software testing choice made, mainly that running tests for every user story is inefficient because they have to rerun them for the whole functionality during the Waterfall at end phase.
The average Scrum team delivered a 35% improvement in velocity at Yahoo [1] where teams properly coached delivered 300-400% improvements. The best Scrum Master at MySpace peaked at 267% of initial velocity after 12 weeks and averaged 168% increase in velocity over 12 Sprints. Most teams were less successful.
Utpal Vaishnav shares with us his experience as a new ScrumMaster in this article titled “Seven Things I Wish I’d Known When I Started out as a ScrumMaster“.
Project charter discussions and documentation focuses traditionally on project scope and the goals and objectives for the project. To address specificity of Agile project, the author of this article has recently created and successfully utilized an Agile Development Team Charter. It differs from usual project charter as it focuses more on the ‘how’ of the project.
