Articles on Scrum and Agile Project Management
The adoption of Agile approaches has introduced new ways of thinking about Project Management, which impact Project Management Organizations in various ways. This paper divides the range of practices commonly found in Project Management Office (PMO) into Project Management, Program Management and Portfolio Management. It identifies how the introduction of Agile processes such as Scrum impacts the PMO.
Burn charts are a simple method to monitor work progress in Scrum. This article discusses the details of burn down and burn up charts: which units to measure, how to adapt to scope variations. He gives some guidelines on how to interpret burndown charts. He reminds that the chart should be objective and visible.
An Agile team reset occurs when an Agile team take a step back to review and relearn the foundation principles and practices of Scrum. Justin Hennessy presents in this article how he did it when a team he was coaching had successfully implemented the practices for Scrum but didn’t really understand the values or principles behind it.
In this article, Elton Gao starts by giving us the definition of a good ScrumMaster: someone who knows Scrum well. He or she understands the do’s and don’ts and is familiar with related artifacts and tools. He or she knows how to run a daily Scrum, a planning/review/retrospective meeting and how to take advantages of related tools and so on. But is this enough?
During Scrum adoption, people tend to get away from tasks and activities that they don’t like in traditional projects like documentation or writing proper code comments. In this article, a ScrumMaster shares his experience with a “no documentation” approach. He learned the hard way that minimal documentation is better than no documentation in Scrum projects. The team can decide on a case-by-case basis what level of documentation for which components and code logics is needed.
Should you track individual performances in Scrum and how do you do it? Nanda Vivek says that there is only one answer and this is “No”. Measuring individual productivity is against the spirit of Scrum and the article discusses the importance of being helpful and collaborative in teams. The author however does not give guideline on how to deal in this case with the individual review that is a common practice in many large organizations.
Pair programming is an extreme programming technique that should help Scrum teams to build better software: two heads are better than one, they say, and thus two heads will usually produce a higher-quality system. This article presents the benefits of this technique for the team, the developers and the managers that will appreciate the value of a true team that works well together, collaborates and continuously improves the code base.
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