Videos on Scrum and Agile Project Management
We would like solutions delivered fast without compromising quality, user experience, implicit requirements and non-functional aspects such as scalability and performance. This would have been easier, if we had all the time in the universe. Doing this in a sustainable manner becomes a huge challenge for teams as there are multiple competing forces at play and because software development is very complex.
When you explain the iterative/incremental nature of Agile, most people coming from a waterfall lifecycle say “What? No up-front planning at all?” Some Agile coaches would glibly say yes, but the truth is more complex. Sprint Zero is an Agile term for a time-boxed amount of up-front planning. During Sprint Zero, you identify value stories, get a decent backlog of user stories and you do some architectural proof-of-concepts. The trick is to balance between insufficient planning and analysis paralysis.
The nice metaphor of technical debt introduced some 18 years ago by Ward Cunningham has slowly taken roots in our collective conceptual toolbox, as a nice way to express some of the pains that software projects suffer from. Most software developers who have had some experience with significant, long-lived projects can feel it, sometimes point to it, but more than often can’t do much about it.
Pair programming is sometimes the norm, and some developers really enjoy the collaboration, experiencing enhanced productivity. In other teams, pairing is shunned, avoided, or… faked. Angela Harms did a short survey about pairing attitudes and compared successful and unsuccessful pairing experiences.
Agile estimating and planning in a Scrum software development project will not prevent your boss from asking: “Will you make the date?” This video explains how to use Scrum and the “Cone of Uncertainty” to provide an answer like: “60% probability.”
Fast turnaround in agile projects requires the specifications and testing processes to fit into to short iterations, which is a challenge for many teams when they start out with agile development.
Product owners are under a lot of pressure. On one side, customers, stakeholders and users provide a constant stream of requests and demands. On the other side, developers own their estimates and commitments. It’s easy to take on too much work and resort to heroic prioritisation to try to make things fit. This video gives to Scrum product owners several ideas on how to adapt their product management process to increase quality.
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