Articles, Blog Posts, Books and Quotes on Agile Project Management
T-shaped skills is a metaphor used to describe people with deep vertical skills in a specialized area as well as broader but not necessarily deep skills in other areas. This is a base for cross-functional Scrum teams, but people can resist this. Learn why and what you can do to change this.
The ScrumMaster role is certainly the most original addition of Scrum to the concept of software development teams. How and how much the ScrumMaster should be involved with the teams is a topic for debates in the Agile community. Isn’t the Scrum team supposed to be self-organized in the first place? In this article, Zuzi Šochová, author of The Great ScrumMaster, shares her opinion on some of the common mistakes made by ScrumMasters.
Sometimes, organizations adopting an Agile approach are mostly following Scrum practices like rituals. They might do daily stand-up meetings but do not perceive that the real goal is to deliver quickly value to the customer. In an article, Vinod Santhanam explains how the Value-Oriented Incremental Delivery (Void) approach can help Agile teams to achieve this goal.
Following the famous mantra of “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”, Scrum teams have often a set of metrics to monitor their activity. Velocity, the amount of work performed by a team during a single sprint, might be one of the most famous Agile metric. Doc Norton has written an interesting book about the negative sides of velocity and what might be a good metric for an Agile team.
Gojko Adzic is known in the Agile software development world for his work on requirements presented in his book “Specification by Example – How successful teams deliver the right software”. In this small and easy to read book, he focuses on a single tool that could be very useful for Scrum teams: impact mapping.
Meetings like the daily stand-up or retrospectives are moments that rhythm the journey of Scrum and Agile teams. Sometimes these meetings are almost religiously considered as rituals or ceremonies that bound participants together and that nobody could miss. Is this true? In his book Forming Agile Teams Workbook, Jesus Mendez discusses if the participation to Scrum meetings is mandatory.
In a Scrum team, there are three roles: Product Owner, Development Team and Scrum Master. There is no explicit mention of software testers and some could question if testing specialists are really necessary in Scrum teams. After working on several projects, Eric Delahaye has found that they are and shares with us four reasons why they should be included as soon as the first Sprint Planning.
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