Some teams use the sprint review as a time for product owners or key stakeholders to formally approve the product backlog items completed during the sprint. Is this a good idea?
In this agile principles post from Mike Cohn, discover how Scrum organizations define products. Learn why good product definition avoids problems related to agile team structure, product backlog…
For at least 15 years, I’ve heard people say that projects are dead. Projects and project-based thinking are relics of the 20th century. I don’t buy it. Let me explain. Let’s start…
You have undoubtedly had team members complain at some point about the length of your daily scrums. Join the club. I want to share two extremely simple things you can do to put an end to most of those…
I recently emailed everyone who subscribes to my weekly tips a list of suggestions for ways to motivate team members to arrive on time to the daily scrum. For example, many teams have a rule that if…
Planning Poker relies on relative estimating, in which the item being estimated is compared to one or more previously estimated items. It is the ratio between items that is important. An item…
A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but a five-point story better not go by any other names. Or numbers. Here’s how to maintain consistency across estimates.
Most of the Scrum literature describes a situation in which a team is allowed to work without interruption. But that’s not realistic. Here’s how an interrupt-driven team can plan its…
Although you may wish it weren’t the case, some Scrum Masters need to document how a sprint went. Here’s advice on how to do that in a lightweight, agile manner.
A couple of weeks ago, I participated in a painful sprint planning meeting. You might have been in the same type of meeting. The team was going to great lengths to identify every task they'd need…
Splitting stories has long been one of the biggest challenges facing agile teams. Here are some examples of splitting some reporting stories to demonstrate ways of splitting stories.
