How to balance business and technology requirements in a product backlog to build a successful product in long term. Product ownership is hard stuff. Very often you feel schizophrenia. Often you play for a customer, but later, suddenly, you have to protect your team. Sometimes you are pushed by the business, later by architects [...]
When is the best to accept the user story which is finished and who should accept them? In our Agile and Scrum Fundamentals training, people are (surprisingly) surprised when we present our approach of the acceptance of finished work. At the begging we often observe disagreements, but after a few minutes of an explanation why [...]
This article is the continuation of The Daily Stand-up Checklist for ScrumMasters, part III. The aim of this series of articles is to help ScrumMasters to prepare better for daily stand-up so it is efficient, productive and engaging. These tips are based on our observation of 100+ agile teams in their agile transformations. Daily standup and People Sickness? Vacation? ScrumMaster [...]
Sprint planning is one of the most important ceremonies in the Scrum project management method. Why run it and how? Even the Sprint planning ceremony doesn't seem to be complex, many Agile teams consider it a waste of time. "Let's develop something instead of loosing so much time in the sprint planning." This is [...]
How to choose the best estimation unit in an appropriate time. Should it be storypoints or hours? Or even #noestimates at all? In Agile meetups, we often hear very strong opinions about estimation units. From some perspective, it even sounds like a religion. I. Religion: Story points Most people express an opinion that hours [...]
The Agile company can be recognized by the presence of Kanban boards with index cards of user stories which are put into multiple columns based on their status. Such a board looks simple and easy to handle. For agile teams, this is very welcome due to a low level of bureaucracy, high transparency, and [...]
Roadmaps Editor Real start and end These fields are calculated based on the progress of nested backlog items once their subtask were started. New Delta fields They indicate how much late or earlier the feature has been developed comparing to plans specified in a roadmap. Other changes of the roadmap editor Even ScrumMaster can see [...]
This article is the continuation of The Daily Stand-up Checklist for ScrumMasters, part II. The aim of this series of articles is to help Scrum Masters to prepare better for daily stand-up so it is efficient, productive and engaging. These tips are based on our observation of 100+ agile teams in their agile transformations. Agreements To get things working [...]
This article is the continuation of The Daily Stand-up Checklist for ScrumMasters, part I. The aim of this series is to help Scrum Masters to prepare better for daily stand-up so it is efficient, productive and engaging. These tips are based on our observation of 100+ agile teams in their agile transformations. In the first part, [...]
The daily standup meeting is a fundamental ceremony in Scrum. Even if you do not follow Scrum, it has a huge impact due to the transparency it brings. Most of the Agile teams and ScrumMasters think the daily standup ceremony is the easiest part of Scrum. Well, should it brings you the value, you want to do [...]
We see ScrumMasters fail very often while supporting agile teams in their agile transformations. Based on stories of more than one hundred of ScrumMasters we think that the following 10 ScrumMaster's failures are the top most important for agile teams. 1. Because of Agile People do not care about Agile or Scrum. They want [...]
Do you take care of the complex agile project developed with one or more scrum teams? Are your teams dislocated? Or do you manage product portfolio with the help of ScrumDesk? Now you can do scheduling of the project in ScrumDesk not just with releases or sprints. ScrumDesk Roadmaps are an easy way to plan and schedule [...]
In the first part about agile estimation, we explained the fundamental principles of the estimation. Now it is time to think about how to implement them in real life. Reference stories For estimation, we will need to have 'the catalog of references' so we can compare all new requirements fast & accurately enough. In our [...]
Estimation has been questioned in software development for many years. How can an estimate be made accurately and quickly? And is estimation even necessary? Well, that is the question for thousands of bucks. Because estimation might be expensive. Especially in the age of changes. Time as an estimation unit is wrong! In our agile [...]
ScrumDesk is available for more than three years already and many customers finished dozens of releases and sprints. Now is the best time to forget them! With this version, you can archive release, its sprints, and backlog items so they are not loaded anymore in BACKLOG, PLAN or WORK views. This will significantly increase performance. [...]
Agile development works very well in the product development area. But to build a successful product is much more work than just gather requirements and implement them. One of the trickiest things in agile development is how to prepare requirements that are ready for incremental development while still delivering some value for the customers. [...]
The first blog post about prioritization was focused on MoSCoW - prioritization of the backlog from the perspective of customers. This is not enough for the products development of the commercial company. You need to survive, to pay bills, to pay the next sprints. You have to think about features from the perspective of the [...]
Prioritization is probably the most discussed part of development processes. Product backlogs are often quite complex with hundreds of requirements. How to find user stories in your story map which you should start developing first? Traditional approach The approach of traditional processes is simple. You have high, medium, low priorities. Ok, for some organizations [...]
Agile teams track their tasks on a Kanban board that visualize the status of work with help of multiple columns. Every column means some status. The team member should move task cards between these statuses to indicate on which task he works. Which tasks have been done and which still need to be developed. [...]
What you see on the picture below is a new functionality of ProductDesk module with designer of roadmaps. We are preparing it for the next major release and it is going to be huge, very huge, very, very very huge. Popular sentence these days :) It is going to be available as a free upgrade [...]
The change of our pricing plan has been communicated in October the last year. ScrumDesk's pricing plan is now a combination of the monthly subscription fees for user licenses and one-time payment for selected modules. On March 5th we will start to issue monthly invoices for accounts with more than 4 free user licenses [...]
The latest version of ScrumDesk suite allows you to pay for user licenses and to buy additional packages directly from the application. VISA/MasterCard/Diners Club cards are accepted. Move subtask to other backlog items Until this version, it was possible to move subtask to other backlog item displayed on Kanban board in WORK view. Now you [...]
RCADesk - new module for root cause analysis Are your development teams blocked by impediments? Are you sure you solve the right problems? Agile teams often hit a wall with problems they are not able to solve easily. More often they even try to solve just the first level of problems and not root causes. Process [...]
Create web hook in Slack Click Integration page in Slack.com team page. Add Incoming webhooks integration Choose channel where your messages from ScrumDesk should be kept. Configure this integration webhook icon, description and keep URL that is needed in ScrumDesk Configure Slack integration in ScrumDesk Click Project Setup gear icon in the left panel. Scroll down [...]
Multilevel of requirements was very often repeated request of our clients in the year 2016: to manage a portfolio of multiple small products in the same backlog, to manage non-development aspects of the product as well, to manage complex product with multiple modules, to manage activities and tasks for multiple clients. We have added multiple [...]
Did Story Map and Retro menu items disappear from the left menu on ScrumDesk Start? Your 30 days trial period is over. ScrumDesk consists of multiple modules: ScrumDesk - the module for Scrum project management available for all customers for free. ProductDesk - commercial module ($99 one time payment per company) that helps product [...]
Looking back into history of ScrumDesk It is October 2013 7:00 PM. There it is. The first commit into our git with the newest web application we started to develop. From scratch. But it is not the first one. We even had two other working web applications which were unfortunately not designed as we envisioned [...]
What happen?ScrumDesk Professional for Windows has been available since 2007. It was the fifth tool on the market at that time delivered globally.More than 98% of computers had Windows installed at that time. The Internet has been growing up. ASP.NET applications were modern and JavaScript started to be trendy for simple animations. Internet Explorer was the [...]
Attach files stored in Google Drive Are your files shared in Google Drive? No need to download them and upload to ScrumDesk again. Just paste the link into Attachments section in the side view. As the first get a shareable link from Google Drive. Do you prefer DropBox? In the case of DropBox, [...]
