Estimating and planning are important--even on agile projects. Unfortunately, we’ve all seen so many worthless plans that we’d like to throw them away altogether. The good news is that it is possible to create plans that can be accurate and useful.
Transitioning to an agile process from a traditional process is fraught with potential dangers. Fortunately there are known practices that have proven effective in helping organizations transition to an agile development process such as Scrum. Overcoming resistance, dealing with nay-sayers, picking the right pilot projects, setting expectations, and more will all help you succeed.
Scrum projects make progress in short, timeboxed periods that other agile process call iterations. Knowing how to successful execute a sprint or iteration is vital to the success of any Scrum or agile development project.
No one likes to meet, but some meetings are necessary. And when a meeting is necessary, it’s worth knowing as much as possible about how to get the most out of that meeting, whether it’s sprint planning, daily scrum, review, retrospective, product backlog grooming, release planning or any other agile or Scrum meeting.
A product backlog is an agile or Scrum project’s prioritized features list. The most common way of writing a product backlog is through user stories, which are short, simple statements ideally told from the perspective of a user or customer. Despite their apparent simplicity, or perhaps because of it, user stories have become a primary technique on nearly all agile and Scrum projects.
Scrum and agile projects feature three different roles: a ScrumMaster (or coach), a product owner (or key stakeholder), and the team. While all three roles share a common goal of successfully delivery, each role has distinct responsibilities.
It’s one thing to get agile or Scrum working for one team, it’s another to successfully scale agile or Scrum across a department or entire enterprise.
News from around Mountain Goat Software and from around the world of Scrum and agile development.
Contemplations and stray thoughts on Scrum, agile methodologies, and perhaps even other topics.