Scrum
Articles
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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. |
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5 Tips for Getting Retrospectives Done Right Unfortunately, many retrospectives are not productive. It may be that the discussions are unfocused, not enough data was gathered to be helpful for analysis, or the team concentrates too much on issues they can’t control. Retrospectives should be a key part of an agile process for helping the team improve. Here are five tips that will help you have more valuable retrospectives. |
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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Essential Product Ownership: It takes a Village
Slideshow
Scrum surfaced in 1993. So, the role of a Product Owner has existed for 20+ years. Surely the whole idea is well understood by now. Right? And the role is a simple one. There is a single product owner per product team or teams. Defining and accepting the work to meet the clients’ goals. Always mucking around the backlog. Again, simple and clear. Right? Well, in my coaching travels and observations it’s not that simple. I still see literally tens of organizations and hundreds of teams that struggle with the notion of product ownership. So, let’s go over it one more time. In this talk, join Bob Galen as he shares the patterns and stories of Essential Product Ownership. How the role should look and be properly executed. |
Bob Galen
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The Future of Scrum
Slideshow
In the past two decades, Scrum has become the standard for agile development, with more than 90 percent of teams today using Scrum to deliver working software. But, as Scrum starts into its third decade, it’s not the fresh-faced process framework that came into the world in the summer... |
Dave West
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The T-Shaped Scrum Team: Get in Shape for Your Future
Slideshow
Today, agile teams are being asked to do more than ever before. The notion of a T-shaped person, created by Tim Brown (CEO of IDEO) in the 1990s, describes a new breed of worker—one who goes beyond the standard, assigned role. Mary Thorn believes that the roles of team members can stretch... |
Mary Thorn
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