Blog on Agile principles, practices, and project management tools
Meaningful Agile
Daily stand-up checklist, part III.: Agreements, Definitions of Done & Ready
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 fast, regularly, and often in a self-organized team, Agile is based on the agreements [...]
The Daily Standup Checklist, part II.
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, we covered the Room, Tools and Status sections. Let's continue with the rest. Finish [...]
The checklist for your daily standups, part I.
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 it correctly. In a disciplined way. Agile is about freedom & responsibility. You need [...]
10 ScrumMaster’s Failures
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 a purpose, mastery and personal growth. Offer them agile principles as help which allows [...]
ScrumDesk Roadmaps are here!
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 your project continuously without losing mid-term and long-term timing. What can be done with [...]
Agile Estimation: Reference user stories
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 first post, we did that with the first few buildings and then compared all [...]
Agile Estimation: Principles
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 training, we asked trainees to visualize the number of outcomes they could finish per [...]
ScrumDesk 5.25.1: Archive old Releases
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. Archived items are still available in REPORTS and DOCUMENTS so you can check what [...]
How to build product: Let’s start with the business
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. Businesses need to constantly deliver new functionality to survive. Customers want new functionality or [...]
Prioritization by Business value in Agile
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 company as well. You should consider the business value in your Agile prioritization. Business [...]
How to prioritize in Agile I.: Customer’s perspective with MoSCoW
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 it is still not enough so they have priorities on the scale of 0 [...]
How to work with Kanban board
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. ScrumDesk enables such functionality even in the distributed or collocated teams. The design of [...]
ScrumDesk 5.23.2: Roadmap is coming!
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 for every customer who had bought ProductDesk. This is not just UX proposal, it is [...]
More than 4 users? Check your ScrumDesk account before March 5th!
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 (commercial) or 20 licenses (non-profit). Please check your account settings before March 5th. Billing [...]