More asking, less telling. As an agile leader, you can adopt the approach of humble enquiry to build relationships, increase trust and collaboration, and deal with the challenges of organizational transformations for your Scrum team.
T-shaped skills is a metaphor used to describe people with deep vertical skills in a specialized area as well as broader but not necessarily deep skills in other areas. This is a base for cross-functional Scrum teams, but people can resist this. Learn why and what you can do to change this.
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.
Agile and Scrum were supposed to free us from management: self-organized, cross-functional teams who get stuff done without that old-guard hierarchy. In this fauxtopia, some software developers were more equal than others. Can we get the healthy parts back without the Lumberghs? To bring back healthy engineering management, we must first de-mystify and de-stigmatize the concept of management.
Even if Agile approaches favor collocated teams, distributed Scrum teams are more common that what you might think. Many Agile software development teams are based on a virtual organization. This article presents some free online tools that can be used to facilitate retrospectives for distributed Scrum teams.
Imagine you are asked to sit in on a team’s sprint review and retrospective. The team has been having difficulty forming and the Scrum Master has asked you to observe the team dynamics during these two sessions. Are you simply going to watch what’s going on or is there more you can do? Perhaps you are seeing interactions and team dynamics at play without truly realizing what you are observing.
In a Scrum team, there are three roles: Product Owner, Development Team and Scrum Master. There is no explicit mention of software testers and some could question if testing specialists are really necessary in Scrum teams. After working on several projects, Eric Delahaye has found that they are and shares with us four reasons why they should be included as soon as the first Sprint Planning.
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