Scrum
Articles
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Agile Development: Focusing on the Health of Your Code In Scrum, the product owner and the ScrumMaster are supposed to drive sustainable development. But there's a third force missing from the formula: the health of the code itself. We often forget that our code is also a member of our team, and we have to be concerned about its health and well-being as much as any other team member. That means using practices to develop good code from the beginning. |
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5 Ways ScrumMasters Can Enhance Daily Standups Daily standup meetings can turn into a perfunctory chore, with everyone simply going through the motions. It’s the ScrumMaster’s job to make sure that doesn’t happen and the meetings remain useful for everyone. With these five ideas, the ScrumMaster can actively help daily scrums be effective and encourage communication, transparency, and efficient delivery of value. |
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The 4 C’s of Managing Distributed Agile Teams Scrum works well for collocated teams, but working with distributed teams brings its own different challenges. There should be some controls in order to prevent instability, ambiguity, and tension from turning into chaos. As the ScrumMaster is the servant leader of the team, here are four important initiatives the ScrumMaster can take to guide their teams—the four C’s of managing distributed agile teams. |
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The Modern Role of the Agile Business Analyst The business analyst (BA) has played a key role in software development. But within a modern agile context, the role of the BA is less clear, and there is some confusion as to whether the product owner role subsumes that of the traditional BA. Let’s look at the roles the BA can play with agile teams and how to fully leverage their expertise to supplement or augment that of the product owner. |
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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I Manage an Agile Team. Am I Obsolete?
Slideshow
Agile and Scrum Teams are self-organizing and self-managing. As a line manager, what's left to do? Traditionally, managers are responsible for the output of their teams. Sometimes they're even responsible for the for a team's delivery that they do not have direct oversight. This model is flawed. People are complex, a team of people is a complex system. May as well try to manage the weather. To get a handle on the complexity of teams, managers need to act differently in how they lead others. In other words, managers of agile teams will fail if they do not shift their thinking from management to leadership. We can't manage the complexity but we can help people navigate it. Just as we can't stop it from raining, we help teams find umbrellas and take supportive actions when things begin to flood. |
Robert Pieper
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Waterfall to Scrum: It Only Goes Up from Here
Slideshow
You’re a project manager using a waterfall methodology, but the team is not making progress on the work and deadlines are not being met. The requirements aren’t clear, scope keeps changing, deadlines won’t budge, and you can’t get more resources on the project. You were doomed from the start! A common solution to this situation is to adopt Scrum, but that can be difficult as well. Join Toiya Jones-Current as she narrates her personal journey and the baby steps she took to successfully switch from waterfall to Scrum and the transition her project team went through to deliver iteratively and consistently. You'll take back valuable insights into how to keep your team focused on delivering the highest business value every sprint and release. You’ll also explore facilitation techniques to help your team improve its communication and calibration with stakeholders. |
Toiya Jones-Current
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Lean-Agile Learning through Games
Slideshow
Most agile practitioners first learn agile by reading a book, attending a class, or attending local meetings. But learning lean and agile concepts works best when we're able to put some concrete examples and practice behind the concepts. By adding a set of games and exercises that teach and reinforce lean and agile concepts to our toolboxes, change agents can provide some practical basis for conversations both inside and outside their organizations. In this talk join experienced agile coach Bill DeVoe, as he shares two of his “go to” games. First, up will be The Name Game, a game that reinforces the downsides of multitasking and benefits of completing work. And second will be a modified version of the Scrum Penny Game – a multi-round exercise that demonstrates many lean-agile concepts, like flow, prioritizing value, and delivering small batch sizes over large ones. |
Bill DeVoe
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Let's (Re)Learn about Agile and Scrum in One Hour!
Slideshow
Every software conference has a number of folks who are brand-new to agile—as well as folks who think they understand it but could use a solid refresher. This interactive presentation will focus on newbies who want to understand the key concepts of both agile and Scrum. Certified Scrum trainer Steven Spearman will give an overview of the key concepts and learning approaches needed to understand agile and Scrum in one hour. While he will cover the structural basics of roles and events, he’ll focus primarily on key concepts of complexity, why traditional methods fail us so often, taking advantage of emergence, and how to fully engage everyone in the creative process. Working within the constraints of the physical meeting space, you'll use two or more interactive activities to drive home agile concepts in a more fun and concrete way. |
Steven Spearman
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