Scrum
Articles
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It's Not Just Culture: When Teams Impede Agile Adoption Cultural norms can hamper successful agile transformation. Many of these habits and customs are started and perpetuated by senior leadership, but that’s not always the only source of resistance. Often, ingrained behaviors and thinking can occur within the team, including business partners, that also can hinder agility. Five of these barriers are explored here, as well as mindset antidotes to help get the team on the road to agile success. |
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Business Storytelling in an Agile Context Storytelling in business is about sharing the context—explaining different aspects of the same information through different perspectives, such as the customer’s wishes or various internal department needs. The more each person shares their point of view, the more the knowledge deepens, which provides a solid story in a business context. Here's how storytelling can help your agile team. |
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5 Ways to Tackle Mobile Development Problems Early with Scrum Using Scrum for mobile application development can be difficult due to various challenges inherent to building mobile applications. Environmental dependencies, platform limitations, service outages, ownership and access issues, and short sprints can all derail your agile development. Here are some tips for overcoming these five common mobile application development issues early by using Scrum. |
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Redefining the Project Manager Role in Scrum Scrum teams are meant to become self-sustaining, so it’s natural for project managers to wonder how they will fit into this new environment. But they still have important skills. Their new role may—and probably will—look different from the traditional project manager role they’ve been used to, but there are still plenty of opportunities to provide real value to their new Scrum team. |
Interviews
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DevOps Misconceptions and Testing Confidence: An Interview with Hans Buwalda
Video
In this interview, Hans Buwalda, the CTO at LogiGear, details the common misconceptions people have when it comes to DevOps. He also discusses continuous integration and continuous deployment, having the right amount of confidence when it comes to testing, and how to know if DevOps is right for you. |
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Shifting Left and Going beyond Agile: An Interview with Michael Nauman In this interview, Michael Nauman, a testing lead for AutoCAD Web, explains how we can go beyond basic agile principles. He digs into the current state of shift-left testing, the importance of aligning your DevOps with your automation, and using agile as a starting point on your quality journey. |
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Scaling Agile: A Guide for the Perplexed: An Interview with Sanjiv Augustine
Podcast
In this interview, Sanjiv Augustine, the president of LitheSpeed, sheds light on a handful of scaling frameworks, including the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS), and the simple scrum of scrums meeting. |
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The Fundamentals of Agile: An Interview with Jeff Payne
Podcast
In this interview, Coveros CEO and agile instructor Jeff Payne discusses why you should make the move to agile, its many benefits, and how to transition. He also explains his SQE Training course, Fundamentals of Agile Certification. |
Better Software Magazine Articles
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Scrum: Back to Basics So you think you know Scrum? Using the whimsical notion of farm animals and light-hearted visuals, take a refreshing review of the entire Scrum lifecycle as an intuitive set of roles, responsibilities, and handoffs. Particular attention is placed on what the ScrumMaster and product owner are expected to do at each handoff. |
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Reshaping Our View of Agile Transformation Transforming a software development team to agile may not go as planned. The real change requires a phased approach to earn agile acceptance. That mindset must extend beyond the team to the entire organization. |
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Alternate Testing Models: A Tale of Veggies and Precious Gems As if working at Lego isn’t fun enough, Sherri Sobanski delights in finding new ways to test. Faced with a situation requiring a complete product redesign, she shares the route her team took to overhaul testing. |
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The Mindset of the Agile Developer Most software development teams these days adopt an agile approach to guide projects through their lifecycle. But, according to Gil Broza, embracing popular practices is not enough. To work effectively in an agile environment, developers must change their mindset. |
Conference Presentations
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ScrumMasters: The Struggle Is Real
Slideshow
Are you a new ScrumMaster who is trying to figure out what the heck to do each day? Or have you been a ScrumMaster for a little while now but still find it difficult to set aside time to continue to grow your team’s knowledge of agile best practices? Do you struggle to improve the team dynamic or the relationship with your product owner because you are too busy removing roadblocks all day? These situations have become all too familiar. Courtney Wilkinson knows because she has successfully overcome many herself. As a former ScrumMaster and current agile coach, Courtney can tell you the struggle is real. Regardless of what you have been told, you don’t have to solve every roadblock alone. Join Courtney as she shares some tactical techniques, including a list of four specific questions you can teach your team, to combat these roadblocks in your day-to-day work. |
Courtney Wilkinson
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The Essential Product Owner: Partnering with Your Teams
Slideshow
While the Scrum product owner is arguably the most crucial role within agile teams, we often hear horror stories about POs who aren’t available to their teams, change their minds incessantly on business priorities, or ignore quality requirements and technical debt. Even the best POs struggle to meet the demands of their “regular business-focused job” while providing sufficient team guidance. Bob Galen shares real-world situations where he’s observed product owners who deliver truly balanced value for their business stakeholders. Find out how story mapping and release planning set the stage for effective team workflow by establishing a big-picture product view for everyone to see. Explore ways to develop shared goals—at both the iteration and release levels—to cement the partnership between the product owner and the rest of the team. |
Bob Galen
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Agile Testing in a Waterfall World
Slideshow
What can a tester do when they join an organization that isn’t really agile—or maybe is (gasp) still waterfall? In these situations, it is important to focus on the values and principles that make up agile. Even in a development environment that does not strictly follow an agile-related methodology like Scrum or kanban, the tester can still bring agile principles to their testing. Kat Rocha will share real-world experiences relating to how test engineering can act agile within a waterfall development team, as well as what is important for testing in a team that is undergoing an agile transformation. Finally, Kat will discuss how even these small agile methodology changes can make test engineering more efficient and effective. |
Kat Rocha
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How Agile Killed Managers
Slideshow
Agile adoption has changed the corporate landscape in many different ways. And while the change has been mostly positive for the teams, some can see agile and Scrum ideas as a revolt against traditional management practices. If the team is self-organized, then what's the manager's role? Have no fear—managers are not obsolete; their job just looks a little different. Katy Sherman will discuss how agile has reshaped the manager's role. You will see examples of what not to do, such as when managers become a real obstacle during agile adoption, as well as learn how individuals, teams, and managers can work together to become successful and achieve true agility. All agile enthusiasts—including engineers and other individual contributors, product owners, managers, ScrumMasters, and agile coaches—are welcome, so come exchange ideas and learn techniques to become effective agile leaders, regardless of your titles and roles. |
Katy Sherman
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