Quotes on Scrum and Agile Project Management
The last Agile Manifesto principle states that “At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.” For Scrum teams, the sprint retrospective is therefore a key meeting for continuous improvement. The results are however not always satisfying. In his book “Essential Scrum“, Kenneth Rubin discusses the most common issues in sprint retrospectives that he has noticed in his Agile coaching experience.
If delivering business value should be the main goal of a software development project, not all the developers’ activities are contributing to this objective. In his book ” Scrum Shortcuts without Cutting Corners”, Ilan Goldstein discusses how you should deal with bugs and the technical aspects of your software project.
Even if Agile was initially considered as an anarchic approach due to practices like self-organization, the reality is that it requires a lot of discipline. Metrics is an important tool to assess the continuous improvement efforts of Scrum teams. However, setting a good metric program is not obvious. The book “The Agile Culture” contains interesting thoughts about what could make a metrics program fail.
Budget-based project management is an alternative to classic estimates that has some following in the Agile community. In their book “Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve your User Stories”, Gojko Adzic and David Evans, discusses how using a budget instead of estimates can help to deliver better projects.
It’s all too common these days to see arguments on Twitter or mailing lists with these rules-bound zealots arguing that ”you’re not agile” because you aren’t following the rules to their satisfaction.
The ScrumMaster is a key element of the Scrum teams that need such a role for facilitating their work. In his book “Scrum Shortcuts without Cutting Corners”, Ilan Goldstein discusses the question if a ScrumMaster can be member of multiple Scrum teams.
Agile and Scrum short iterations should provide software development organization with quicker feedback cycles and help them shifting from building the product right to building the right product. In their book “The Lean Mindset”, Mary and Tom Poppendieck provides an original perspective on this issue.
