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.
Last week I wrote about "Sprint Zero" and made the point that on the rare occasion when this might be a good idea, Scrum teams would be better off thinking of that time as a "project before the project." Projects do not spring to life fully formed--that is, staffed and ready to be worked on. The vast majority of projects can, though, be instantly started and things like…
In my previous post, I wrote about alternatives to numbering sprints
Some teams like to number their sprints. Most simply use integers: Sprint 1, Sprint 2, Sprint 3... But I've also seen teams use things like Sprint 1.1 and 1.2 to indicate the first and second sprints of the first release of a product. The second release would start over with Sprint 2.1.
I've also seen teams date-stamp their sprints. A sprint ending on 18 May would be known…
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I've decided we should kick all the testers out of sprint retrospectives. We don't need them. They aren't really part of the team, anyway. 
They think differently and their issues…
In a post back in March I introduced a term on this blog that I'd been trying out in discussions and a few classes. The term was GASP and it stood for a Generally Accepted Scrum Practice. What I'm interested in right now, and I'm hoping everyone here will help with, is creating a list of all the GASPs we can think of.
But first, we need to more formally define what a GASP…
It's summer and I've been thinking about sailing. I didn't get to do any this summer, but I can still think about it. Thinking about sailing reminded me of the 1995 America's Cup race between the US and New Zealand. That race is a great illustration of the importance of both getting close to our customers and of rapid feedback.
To design their boat, Team New Zealand made…
When it comes to agile projects, one element of agile project management that is difficult for teams to master is how to overlap their work. If a team doesn’t learn effective ways to do this, team members may settle on a less desirable approach: activity-specific sprints. An activity-specific sprint is as bad a practice as it would be an acronym. In this approach, the team…
Even before the ascendancy of agile methodologies like Scrum, we knew we should automate our tests. But we didn’t. Automated tests were considered expensive to write and were often written months, or in some cases years, after a feature had been programmed. One reason teams found it difficult to write tests sooner was because they were automating at the wrong level. An…
Agile project management approaches favor an incremental, just-in-time approach to design. As such, Scrum projects do not have an upfront analysis or design phase; all work occurs within the repeated cycle of sprints. This does not mean, however, that design on a Scrum project is not intentional. An intentional design process is one in which the design is guided through…
