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Agile Team Challenges Five Agile Challenges for Distributed Teams

The framework for agile development empowers the diverse environments of modern business. While some project teams can be collocated, many projects are undertaken by teams who are distributed geographically or organizationally. This article focuses on five challenges faced by these distributed agile development teams and provides some solutions.

Harsha Vemulapalli's picture Harsha Vemulapalli
Hopeless Projects The Advantages of Hopeless Projects

Team members involved in hopeless projects become dejected, stressed, and overworked. Are there any silver linings to working on a doomed project? This article argues that there are. When you and your teammates are stretched to your limits, you can learn a lot about each other, your managers, and what it takes to make a successful product.

Maryna Kaliada's picture Maryna Kaliada
Effective Prioritizing Prioritizing Effectively as a Team

If you’ve ever worked on a development project, you know you can never be that sure that everything will be completed on deadline. By prioritizing actively, you can change success from something binary—either we make it or we don’t—into something more gradual. By doing this, you increase the chance of succeeding in delivering something. If you prioritize really well, that something may even turn out to be far more valuable than anything you penned down in your initial plan.

Tobias Fors's picture Tobias Fors
Estimate Your Work Need to Learn More about the Work You’re Doing? Spike It!

How do you estimate work you've never done before? One proven method is to spike it: Timebox a little work, do some research—just enough to know how long it will take to finish the rest of the work—and then you can estimate the rest of the work. You don’t waste time, you can explore different avenues of how best to complete the task, and your team learns together.

Johanna Rothman's picture Johanna Rothman
Delight Your Customers Excite and Delight Your Customers by Using the Kano Model

Chandra Munagavalasa writes that because the requirements change over time, the product backlog is never complete. As the project progresses and more detailed information becomes available, the product backlog items and their rankings change continually. One of the many techniques available for ranking the product backlog is the Kano model.

Chandra Munagavalasa's picture Chandra Munagavalasa
Agile World Typewriter Writing in an Agile World

Sarah Johnson explains the role of writing in an agile world and how to educate your team members. Remember, agile takes into account that each situation is unique, and you need to determine what makes the most sense for your particular Scrum team.

Sarah Johnson's picture Sarah Johnson
Communicating Effectively in Agile Development Projects Communicating Effectively in Agile Development Projects

In today’s fast-paced workplace, software developers and project managers are confronted with a painful paradox. They are faced with continual pressure to accelerate the development process, but this “need for speed” can result in communication failures—and the accompanying project and quality problems.

Payson Hall's picture Payson Hall
The Self-Abuse of Sprint Commitment The Self-Abuse of Sprint Commitment

Adam Yuret explains what can go wrong when teams blindly commit themselves to sprints; collaboration and quality suffer when we pressure people to work themselves to death by forcing them to promise things they cannot yet understand. Investing in systems-thinking approaches to improve the lives of our workers will pay dividends in improved quality, engagement, and creativity.

Adam Yuret's picture Adam Yuret
 Assumptions to Model Value (or Not) Using Goals, Objectives, and Assumptions to Model Value (or Not)

Kent McDonald writes that identifying objectives and the assumptions underlying them provides you a way to measure whether the result of your project will actually get you closer to what you are trying to accomplish, as well as the impact your various assumptions have on reaching that objective. 

Kent J. McDonald's picture Kent J. McDonald
Using Agile for Requirements Management Using Agile for Requirements Management

Charuta Phansalkar writes on the necessity of capturing and understanding requirements using agile practices. Agile, when implemented effectively, will ensure that the customer's voice is clearly understood throughout the project, which results in maximum customer satisfaction.

Charuta Phansalkar's picture Charuta Phansalkar

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