Participants in my Certified ScrumMaster courses are often surprised when I recommend that programmers participate in story-writing workshops. After all, a story-writing workshop is a meeting targeted…
Vision and Backlog Scrum is a great framework for building a product with the right features. It encourages the use of a vision shared by the product owner, the ScrumMaster, the development team, and…
All of a Scrum team’s members should be present when playing Planning Poker. You may be tempted to estimate without the individuals in some role—don’t.
To see how this applies to an agile project, consider the issue of whether a team should earn velocity credit for fixing bugs during a sprint. A team that uses velocity to measure how much…
I guess I angered a few Scrum purists recently when I said that it's OK for an experienced team to occasionally show unfinished work in a sprint review. I'm probably going to anger them…
During sprint reviews, teams are supposed to demonstrate only those product backlog items that are done. But there is one time a team might consider breaking this rule. Discover when and why that…
I recently helped to facilitate a two-day planning session for an important initiative at Adobe that would require coordination across several component teams in multiple locations. Going in, my agile…
Many of the challenges in agile and Scrum stem from the idea of the self-organizing team. Of course, many (perhaps most) of the benefits are also the result of self-organizing teams. One of the…
