Articles on Scrum and Agile Project Management
In the past, the Scrum Guide consistently used the word “priority” for the Product Backlog or noted that the Product Backlog was “prioritized.” While the Product Backlog must be ordered, prioritization is only one technique and rarely a good one to achieve this objective. The new Scrum Guide instead uses the term ordered for the Product Backlog.
Implementing Scrum on a custom (or bespoke) software development project can be difficult and many organizations new to the agile methodology struggle to adopt it. Typical issues/obstacles that arise include lack of business ownership and the inability to make decisions, limited business buy-in into the concept of Agile or team communication and individual skills. When introducing Agile, organizations often attempt to tackle all of these issues head on and get overwhelmed with the new methodology, then choosing to revert back to what they are familiar with. Why not moving gradually to Scrum, enabling an organization to deal with issues one at a time and gain the benefits associated with solving each issue gradually?
This article provides an overview on the derivation and application of user stories, which are the primary concept that represent the user requirements in agile software development approaches like Scrum. Its goal is to describe the user story in detail, because it contains the key agile practices that help align solutions directly to the user’s specific needs, assuring quality at the same time.
This article suggests that it would be wise to think, very candidly, whether Agile is really something that your company can achieve. The less transparency is tolerated in a company, the less traction Agile will get. Another key prerequisite for being Agile is having the ability to have adult conversations.
The art of writing good User Stories is the most difficult for new teams. The mistakes made at that point lead to wrong Test Cases, wrong understanding of requirements and the worst of all wrong implementation which can be direct cause of rejecting the deliverables at the end of the iteration. This article presents the five most common mistakes people make writing user stories.
There is a strong human predisposition to assume, with the consumption of budget and the passing of time, that actual project progress is proceeding at the same pace. Sadly, facts recorded at project completion have repeatedly failed to demonstrate this correlation. Earned Value Management (EVM) is a tool that should help to solve this problem.
This article explores some of the principles of agile interactions of Scrum teams. More specifically, it focuses on those interactions necessary to discovering and elaborating requirements within the context of the Scrum framework.
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