Articles, Blog Posts, Books and Quotes on Agile Project Management
In his article “Effective Retrospectives & Reviews” Marco Mulder illustrates how Scrum teams can continuously improve by using a combination of their definition of done, working agreements and the product backlog.
Some people want to take the stance that no work should be done in advance of the sprint. That is clearly untenable. To see why, let’s take that view to its extreme: If we did nothing in advance to understand what we’re building, we’d show up at the planning meeting and say, “Hey, what should we build this sprint? We were working on an eCommerce site yesterday, but I think maybe we should switch to writing a word processor…” The team would literally have nothing written down—no product backlog / user stories / prioritized feature list at all.
Scrum teams just look different. From their faded whiteboards to their discarded post-it notes, Scrum teams make their mark just by doing their job. Read one CSPs story of how his team’s space tells the story of their struggles and their triumphs.
This blog post is about how to improve software project estimations by breaking tasks into sizes no larger than one productive day.
Written by Jeff Sutherland, Anton Victorov, and Jack Blount, “Distributed Scrum: Agile Project Management with Outsourced Development Teams” analyzes and recommends new best practices for globally distributed agile teams. Toyota routinely achieves four times the productivity and twelve times the quality of competitors. Can Scrum do the same for globally distributed teams? Two agile companies, SirsiDynix using Scrum, and StarSoft Development Labs using Scrum with some XP engineering practices, achieved comparable performance developing a Java application with over 1,000,000 lines of code. SirsiDynix best practices are similar to those observed on distributed Scrum teams at IDX Systems, radically different than those promoted by PMBOK, and counterintuitive to some practices advocated by the Scrum Alliance.
Risk management is a central part of traditional project management and is included as one of the knowledge areas in the Project Management Institute’s (PMI) body of knowledge. In many of my classes, participants ask how Scrum and agile address risk management. Some are concerned that agile or Scrum ignore risk management completely. This post explains how to manage risk on agile projects with the risk burndown chart.
“Perhaps you’ve read a book, on Extreme Programming and have decided that is the right approach for your company. Or maybe you attended a Certified ScrumMaster training course and think Scrum sounds good. Or maybe you read a book on a different agile process, and it sounds perfect for your organization. In all likelihood, you’re wrong. None of these processes as described by their originators is perfect for your organization. Any may be a good starting point, but you will need to tailor the process to more precisely fit the unique circumstances of your organization, individuals, and industry.” Reference: “Succeeding With Agile”, Mike Cohn, Addison-Wesley, 463 pages, IBSN 978-0-321-57936-3
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