Quotes on Scrum and Agile Project Management
Most teams I work with have three distinct roles; BA, Developer, and QA. Most teams I work with have three distinct phases of their work; gather requirements, build, verify. Even on agile teams, these separations exist.
Figure 3 deliberately shows an iteration running mid-week to mid-week. My experience, and the experience of others assisting teams, is that running iterations mid-week to mid-week is more effective than running them Monday to Friday.
Every Product Owner is different. Every Product Owner needs to work out what is right the right way for them to fill the Product Owner role. Every organization is different. Every team is different, and every individual is different.
We all know that there are three roles in Scrum teams : product owner, scrum master, and the development team. Modern software development can sometimes require some specializations that could be beyond the capabilities of the Scrum team members. UX and Web design, database administration, performance testing are some examples of activities that requires specific expertise only for a limited amount of time. How do you deal with it?
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.
How do you manage software quality in Scrum? In traditional waterfall projects, teams will try to detect bugs in the final software testing activities like integration and acceptance tests. With the short timeframe of Scrum sprints, this approach does not work for Agile projects. In his book Scrum Product Ownership, Robert Galen provides some guidance on how to build quality software with one fundamental tip: you don’t test quality!
We all know the “Definition of Done” used in Scrum for items that should be potentially shippable to the customer at the end of the sprint. In his book Essential Scrum, Kenneth Rubin discusses the “Definition of Ready” that applies to product backlog items that should be ready to be developed before the start of the sprint.