Short cycles provide us with a wealth of benefits in terms of fast feedback, minimal design in process and increased flow. Plan driven sprints however stress the system, force good people to make bad decisions and is built on the faulty belief that capacity utilization is the main problem in high variability environments like product development.
Mike Cohn wrote an interesting post where he discusses he allows or even encourages to estimate with story points as large as 20, 40, and 100. He explains that they are useful when you need first and not necessarily precise estimate of the general size of a new project being considered.
Velocity is killing agility is the observation discussed by Jim Highsmith in this blog post. He explains that this metric is increasingly used for the wrong reasons: measuring productivity and focusing on volume delivery instead than on quality. He concludes saying that the importance given to velocity should be balanced with other metrics like feature value, feature delivery cycle time or quality.
The Scrum Expectation Line is defined by Zsolt Fabók as the line that follows the expectations of the Product Owner during each sprint. In this blog post, he discusses the difference between the team capacity to deliver and what the Product Owner wants in each Sprint and explains how his team deals with it.
In this blog post, Kristen Bornemann shares her thought about getting quick results from iteration in the context of the independent game developers. There is a fine line between making quick iteration a focus and getting bogged down in process.
In this blog post, Mike Caspar gives a detailed answer to the question: What if your first scrum sprint ends up with zero story points completed?
“If the team is uncertain about how to achieve the sprint goal or if experimentation or prototypes need to be done, then the sprint should be shorter. Uncertainty implies that the work eventually required for the sprint might be significantly different from what was anticipated at the start. If this is the case, it’s better to change direction after two weeks than four.”
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