A story about a leader and management motivated to actively support Agile. Just the title sounds like an oxymoron to those of us, who apply Agile principles. Yes, I have to affirm that Agile is often perceived by management as another toy for the developers. That’s why the implication of Agile is a whole [...]
The Definition of Ready helps save a lot of money on development for little effort. Or, why define requirements properly. The Punkers team The Punkers have been the worse team for a client and their management for several years now. Their requirements are constantly stretched, and even if they can be completed, the client [...]
Lots of requirements. Lots and lots and lots A story about what will your ‘Yes’ answer cause in the long run. Lots of work. If it was about fire being once here and once there. But the fire burns always, everywhere and every single day. We develop a number of system customizations and our app [...]
Yet another week of mentoring is over; the next team is ready, and another one is prepared. This time, it was, as always, quite unique and exciting. As I always say. We met a new team of people, working in a successful company, and even though they’ve been sitting in the same room for [...]
About the life of the agile team, relations, Scrumastership, responsibilities, and some good practices. “KEEP CALM SCRUM MASTER IS HERE" When I started in one of the company’s development teams, I had no experience with Scrumastership. The team was already formed and was in the “storming” phase. After coming into the team, we reset [...]
Self-organized teams are fundamental to the success of agile approaches. But what does self-organization means? 5-6 years ago we started to introduce agile to CxO of multiple clients. I remember that the most unbelievable for them was a term self-organized teams. Well, it was unimaginable to see people working without any Mr. Commander. Without [...]
Chooses the right things. Many customers of our consultancy services ask us for some brief and practical description of the role of the Product Owner. Here is our attempt to provide not just some theory, but some additional practical tips for this role as well. The Product Owner The Product Owner role is a [...]
What is an agile epic, what to use it for, and foremost how? Requirements. Small, large, technical, business, operational, and researchable. And above all, plenty of them. During four years of ScrumDesk development, we have more than 800 requirements in our backlog. And these are the only requirements that we have decided to implement [...]
Are you distressed by the huge amount of defects in the product? In this article, you will learn about what practical possibilities you have in agile teams and managing error correction. One of the first questions that pop up whilst introducing agile is how to deal with errors. Too often I hear an immediate answer: [...]
Story A: Joe I’ve known ever since high school. Incredibly nice, funny guy. The one you’d like to have in a team. Scrum was always an interesting topic for Joe and he’d read many books about it and showed a lot of interest. When I asked the team who'd wanted to be a Scrum [...]
Last year many people asked us about the benefits of Agile compared to traditional ways of creating products. Because of that we had a short brainstorming session and came up with this list of forty advantages of Agile: A customer gets value regularly even during the first weeks of development. Products are usable after [...]
Teamwork is a part of my professional life for the last 20 years. In roles from a team member, team leader, to manager and mentor I had an opportunity to observe different team setups as well as different team dynamics and how it influences the final result. I have always been curious about these [...]
In the last week, I attended a couple of sprint review sessions. Some of you maybe call them sprint demo. Ok, simply to say, the meeting at the end of the sprint where you are supposed to show your sprint's achievements. In my case, all sprint review sessions had something in common. People were [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 works very well in a product-oriented environment. It’s understandable, as Agile Manifesto as a key document of whole Agile stresses the functional product as one of the most important values. When implementing agile practices, Product development is very often reduced to: Description of responsibilities for Product Owner role, Request recording, Maintenance of backlogs, [...]
