How to break free from the traditional way of estimation in projects with the help of Agile estimation techniques and principles? Estimation is a widespread practice that businesses impose a significant emphasis on. Businesses include the estimation in their processes as a must-have part. Typical reasons for the estimation include the following: To understand the [...]
Do you feel that your team needs to improve relationships, or do you want to help them get to know each other better? Try personal maps with them, and you will not regret it. A personal map is a technique that helps people find common topics for conversation effortlessly and easily. Get inspired on [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Sprint review report Do you want to be prepared for a sprint review session with all information necessary to review your commitments and the status of the outcome? Sprint report is the document that summarizes: Sprint title and goals Sprint start and end dates Information about the team who worked on sprint items Information [...]
Although Agile looks chaotic in practice at first glance, good agile teams take heed to the rules agreed upon in a team. Rules for the daily stand-up Rules for the daily stand-up should cover the following: Where will be the stand-up held? What time does the stand-up start? What is the duration of the [...]
While being in agile transition, teams look for information on how to do agile correctly. Often the question sounds 'How to DO agile?' We prepared Scrum Guideline that we hope might be helpful to shorten your Agile transformation and stabilize the agile environment sooner. The paper describes all Scrum ceremonies with a focus on [...]
Doing agile are many obstacles identified. It is not easy to check what does well implemented agile means. A scale of changes that agile transition has brought is often big and related to more areas - to product, project, leadership, team, tools, development practices and organization as well. The question asked by teams is [...]
Pig & chicken Metaphor that helps to distinguish people actively involved in development of the product and people who should not interrupt the team in an iteration. Product Owner Father of the product. Responsible for product success. Provides a vision to the team. Communication channel between the team, stakeholders and customers. Responsible for: product [...]
The transition of teams to agile is always challenging. People have expectations, habits, and beliefs about Agile. We worked with teams they were saying We are agile already. Because we are time boxed. Well, yes, you are right. Partially. The agile means a much wider range of practices. An agile coach can explain principles [...]
Team Manager It is suggested to have an agile team not bigger than 7-9 people. In the case of the big project, this leads to having more teams that need to be synchronized. ScrumDesk keep teams hierarchically organized in Team Manager page. In this page Scrum Master can: manage teams add/remove team members from [...]
An agile retrospective is one of the most important ceremony in Scrum. There are lot of ways how to do it. We would like to provide to ScrumMasters and teams an overview how to do retrospective. And we are starting with Agile Retrospective: Set stage
As you are aware, Scrum is based on values very nice summarized by Mike Vizdos's o this cartoon. All of them, however, requires to define working agreement supporting creation of these values. An adaptation is in Scrum done at different levels, mostly through collaboration. Teams have to have common understanding, common vocabulary. We use [...]
ScrumDesk for Windows (retired): Step 2 - Define a team Who Product Owner Work that needs to be done can be easily distributed in more development teams. ScrumDesk connects teams in one virtually connected social community. This community is notified by the ScrumDesk notification system about any change. Teams can be distributed over the [...]
In this step, the Product Owner and development team will try to plan project releases. Who Product Owner Scrum Master Planning in SCRUM SCRUM is based on development in timeboxes called Sprint. Sprint is the time needed to complete selected stories (features, bugs, requirements, tasks,...). The length of the sprint is typically 30 days, [...]
Who Scrum Master Developers Visitors Starting the sprint Scrum Master login to ScrumDesk before the Daily Scrum Meeting. The first thing he must do is start the sprint. To start it display SideView/Sprint and press the big red Start sprint button. If a sprint is started all changes made to remaining and duration time, changes [...]
