This article discusses the the role of the Product Owner in moving a backlog item to done. It explores how to achieve the productivity benefits of an up-front enabling specification, given the reality that Scrum is an empirical framework in which emergent understanding of the story under development is inherent. “Done” is not some arbitrary state of a backlog item. When an item is done, users can take advantage of the new functionality and give meaningful user feedback. The article lists some common issues with software delivery: annoying user interface, busy ...

LeanKit and Focused Objective announced a partnership to provide customers with an integrated product offering. The combined solution will bring industry leading quantitative analysis to LeanKit’s and Focused Objective’s customer base in an easy to use and immediately available way. This analysis includes forecasting project delivery dates, pinpointing what factors such as staffing, quality, scope change, etc. are having the greatest impact on delivery dates, and the ability to find what staff skill additions will have the most impact. “The ability to answer tough questions relating to date, cost, staff and ...

Trac is an open source enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects. Trac uses a minimalist approach to web-based software project management. It provides an interface to version control systems (Subversion, Git, Mercurial, …), an integrated Wiki and convenient reporting facilities. As many open source project, Trac has a plugin architecture that allows to extend the core functionalities. Here is a list of Scrum and Agile oriented plugins available in the Trac ecosystem. Trac is build with Python and can run on various Linux distributions, Mac OS ...

Matthew Evans shares with us an Excel spreadsheet that allows to record and visualize informations about your Scrum sprint. One sheet allows to manage the sprint data with the estimated and actual work for each story. A project page consolidate the sprints data at a project level.  Visit the “Agile scrum project management spreadsheet” page to get the spreadsheet.

The Scrum of Scrums is the key for scaling large, multidimensional projects that cross departments, teams, and traditional boundary lines so that can be managed using the same protocols and logic of a fundamental, small-team project. Bryan Zarnett explains that where most ScrumMasters fail in this large-scale environment is in the nuances of communicating and coordinating multiple teams. The same tool set used to run a small Scrum team cannot be used for a collective of teams. He defines the role of an Agile Program Manager (APM) that will coordinate ...

Are you using Scrum? Can you do better? This video examines essential coaching strategies and techniques for improving your Scrum Teams and how to take the first step in igniting change. It walks you through ways to coach change and most importantly ways to sustain this change and make a lasting impact. Video Producer: http://www.scrum.org/

Most of us do the exercise of rating team members every year even if we know that software is built by teams, not individuals. Moreoever, each individual needs to actively collaborate to produce quality software. This means that everyone on the team needs to take collective ownership and help each other, because the motive is not to be a hero but to build an end product of the utmost quality and predictability. This article proposes a 11 points process to assess individuals in an Agile way: Determine goals for every individual. These ...

Principles from the Agile Manifesto have been used rapidly throughout industry on software development projects at first, and eventually into projects that are not software centric. This article focuses on the application of Scrum to enable stability for the execution of systems engineering (SE) activities at Boeing and the development of requisite systems engineering work products throughout the product development lifecycle. Mapping the potential costs of defects found by various detection techniques to common development strategies versus the cost-of-change curve very clearly shows that using an agile approach is less costly ...

The Agile Alliance announced its full conference program for Agile2012. The finalized schedule is available for review at http://agile2012.agilealliance.org/program/schedule/. Agile2012, the world’s largest conference for Agile teams, developers, managers and executives, will take place Aug. 13-17 in Grapevine (Dallas area), Texas. “Building on the momentum of 11 years of Agile adoption and maturity, Agile2012 will offer more than 200 sessions, ranging from introductory to highly advanced topics,” said Mitch Lacey, Agile2012 conference chair. “One of my goals was to increase the technical content at the conference, and I believe we ...

Scrum focuses on maximizing Return on Investment (ROI), but it does not define how to manage and track costs to evaluate actual ROI against the vision. A cost measurement that integrates with Scrum would be an additional feedback tool. This article presents the adaptation of the Earned Value Management (EVM) approach to the Scrum framework. The result is called AgileEVM (Agile Earned Value Management) and is a simplified set of earned value calculations. From the values in Scrum, a release date estimate is derived using mean velocity. Using this equation, ...

This is an on-going series of blog posts that want to answer the classical question: How is software testing done during Scrum sprints? In the first installments, Clemens Reijnen discusses the importance of having testing knowledge in the team and implementing a collaborative culture. He then presents regression testing, test automation, end-to-end testing, avoiding overlapping tests, product backlog item implementation sequence, risk and business driven tests, writing acceptance tests. Microsoft Visual Studio is used as an example of tools supporting software testing practices in Scrum sprints.

Martin von Weissenberg explains in his blog post that focus and rapid feedback not only improve software development projects but shorten them dramatically as well. He use an experimental setting to compute the ROI for four different approaches: traditional plan-driven project delivering near the end, an unfocused project with continuous delivery, a focused project with an 80/20 Pareto distribution of value and a focused project with an 80/50 Pareto distribution of value. The results prove that focus and rapid feedback in the form of continuous delivery are game-changer.

What should be the lenght of a Scrum sprint? There is no unique answer to this question. In this blog post, Mitch Lacey provides some key factor to consider when you try to choose the right sprint length for your Scrum project. These should be considered looking at the expected duration of the project, the customers/stakeholders and the Scrum team. His conclusion is that the right sprint length balances a craving for customer feedback and input with the team ability to deliver and the customer’s ability to respond.

One of the first steps in an Agile adoption is the formation and organization of agile teams. Leadership often struggles to figure out how many people should be on each team, what skill sets should included, and whether the team should be focused on solution components, feature delivery, or a mix. This video discusses how the 98th largest company in the Fortune 500 is optimizing their software development process by forming feature and component teams that deliver value continuously, while minimizing interdependencies. Video Producer: http://www.agilevancouver.ca/

How do you manage activities that don’t seem directly related to features in your Scrum sprints? This blog post discusses why it is a problem when Scrum teams start to wonder about having time to manage infrastructure, technical debt or test framework. For Johanna Rothman this is the sign that the culture is not Agile enough and that the product owner doesn’t want to take iteration time to schedule anything other than features in an iteration. She offers seven hints on how to improve this situation, saying that product owners ...

What do you do when models collide? Every team has their own mental model of how things are supposed to work. We often call these “processes” or “methodologies”, but they are really just a shared understanding of how things get done by a team. Sometimes, however, problems can’t be tackled by just one team because of size, company structure, diversity of required skill sets, or any number of other reasons. What then? Easy, just add more teams, right? This doesn’t always work as expected, because the two teams may not ...

There is a tendency to use agile software development approaches and all their practices simply because it is in the book. Why don’t we select the tools based on the context of the task we are trying to complete? Anything that does not add value to the final product is simply an overhead and waste. This video explains how to examine the product to be delivered and determine what is the minimum set of practices that are required to achieve the goal of delivering it. Video Producer: Agile Central Europe Conference

The Agile Alliance has announced Bob Sutton, Dr. Sunita Maheshwari and Joe Justice as keynote speakers for the Agile2012 Conference. Agile2012 is the leading international conference on Agile methods in software development, bringing together many disciplines in the fields of information systems and software development to foster the exchange of fresh ideas and best practices. “Our conference is made up of a group of innovators, people constantly pushing the envelope,” said Mitch Lacey, the Agile2012 conference chair. “The Agile community is constantly looking for ways to improve company culture, innovation in ...

Axosoft, the company behind the leading project management software for software developers, announced today that its newest version of OnTime will now be the lowest priced, feature-rich scrum project management tool in the market. OnTime 12, the 10th anniversary edition of the popular software, will now be offered as three separate products with blazingly fast speed, increased ease-of-use and at a fraction of its previous price tag – up to 90 percent less. “We realize that a drastic price drop for a seasoned company is a bold move, but it’s a ...

The nice metaphor of technical debt introduced some 18 years ago by Ward Cunningham has slowly taken roots in our collective conceptual toolbox, as a nice way to express some of the pains that software projects suffer from. Most software developers who have had some experience with significant, long-lived projects can feel it, sometimes point to it, but more than often can’t do much about it. In most cases, technical debt is seen as something very negative, burdening projects forever under increasing amount of interests. But some technical debt can ...