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Tag Archives: SCRUM
Scrum Master – a Visionary or a Beat Cop?
The Web is full of articles “explaining” what the Scrum Masters’ responsibilities are and how they should help the team to achieve their goals. Unfortunately most of the articles fail to grasp the core concepts of Scrum, and by arguing whether a Scrum Master should or should not be a part of the development team the authors of the articles hint they have no clue what Scrum is.
Yes, the Scrum Master IS part of a team, but he’s part of the Scrum Team, together with the Development Team and The Product Owner(s). SM is the owner of Scrum and he’s the one to make sure both the team and the product owner adhere to Scrum principles. She is the one who works hard to enable, coach the team and by no means manage!
SM is not part of the development team. There are many companies that think they’re doing a great job by rotating the SM role between their developers, but that purely means they haven’t got a clue what the role of SM is, and it is usually richer than most SM job descriptions outline; not reflected in dozens of more lines of job responsibilities, but reflected in the fact that a simple expression “The Scrum Master removes impediments for the team”, or “The Scrum Master helps the team be accountable to themselves” can be only achieved by employing a abundant and Continue reading
Posted in Agile, Lean, SCRUM, Scrum master
Tagged Agile, beat cop, ceremonies, LEAN, management, SCRUM, scrum master, sm, visionary
19 Comments
Just in time, Just Enough Sprint planning
Sprint plannings in Scrum sometimes take long; even when you have all the Stories ready for sprint and estimated. Reason being the team still need to break down stories to tasks, and the Scrum master needs to calculate the capacity and compare the total hours of broken down tasks to the capacity available in order to find out whether the team are committing well, under committing or over committing in order to further negotiate the commitment with the Product Owner if required.
All of this are basics and well accepted, but does it make sense to make the team to break down all the stories right at the beginning of the Sprint – during the planning? Most of the Continue reading
Posted in Agile, Definition of Done, Lean, SCRUM, User Story, sprint planning
Tagged Agile, breakdown, jit, just enough, SCRUM, sprint planning, user story
4 Comments
Getting User Stories ready for the Sprint – “Story Status”
If you’re using Scrum in your organisation to develop software, then you are very well aware of the challenges of getting your Stories spot on. Writing a good User Story is not easy; it depends on both business and development factors.
The ideal Scrum Sprint planning is fast, the estimation session does not drag on, however usually the reality is nothing like that and both the Product owner and the development team are equally to blame.
Many questions raised for each User Story; unclear acceptance criteria; missing artefacts, unresolved cross-team dependencies, unresolved 3rd party dependencies… The problems are far more apparent when the Continue reading
Posted in Agile, SCRUM
Tagged Agile, clarification, product owner, SCRUM, Status, user story
7 Comments
last day at be2, my career at be2 in a sequence of words
software engineering, java, j2ee, jboss, mysql email marketing, blacklisting, smtp, rmi, jms, crm, friends, travel, munich, specification, review, coding, esp, project management, gantt chart, matchmaking, tracking, pixels, company event, travelling, hibernate, spring, tomcat, invoker, redundancy, scalability, data complexity, performance, partitioning, sharding, activemq, broker, soap, http call, queue, strategy, social networks, facebook, lean, agile, architecture, scrum, scrum alliance, agile manifesto, sprint, continuous integration, hudson, static code analysis, transparency, communication, iteration, definition of done, spm, srm, user story, failure, success, confidence level, pair programming, retrospectives, groovy, grails, nosql, mongodb, rest, jersey, value stream, london, development management Continue reading
Posted in Agile, Definition of Done, NoSQL, SCRUM, UnitTests, development, dynamic languages, groovy, pair programming, programming style, tdd, test-driven-development, value stream
Tagged Agile, be2, career, move, SCRUM, sprint
1 Comment
About good Leaders, Agile managers and Value Streams
“A leader is best when people barely know he exists. When his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: We did it ourselves.”
Lao Tzu
Throughout our careers, many of us at some point in time take on the responsibilities of leading teams; whether that’s a group of developers or a large IT organisation we need to decide for us how we lead, what values we follow and what we concentrate our efforts on.
Just because you’re being followed doesn’t make you a leader and just because people have to do what you decides doesn’t make you a leader as well.
While talking about traits that are common for good leaders Davidson-Frame mentions “Honest, Empathetic, Inspired, Continue reading
Posted in Agile, Lean, SCRUM, build quality in, value stream
Tagged Agile, inspirational, kanban, LEAN, management, SCRUM, scrum team, self organisation, team
7 Comments
The Definition of Done (DoD)
What is a Definition of Done?
Definition of Done is a crucial element of a successful scrum software development. When defined and followed, makes sure that when someone says that a task is done. There is an explicit understanding what it means.
For completeness and integrity you would have 3 different definitions of done: for a User Story (a feature), for a Sprint and for a Release. This is also in line with the SCRUM Alliance recommendation.
A User Story Definition of Done
So, let’s pick the User Story DoD, and elaborate more. The User Story DoD’s Continue reading
Posted in Agile, Automated Testing, Definition of Done, SCRUM, UnitTests, testing
Tagged Agile, definition of done, DoD, SCRUM, SCRUM Alliance, software development, team, testing
25 Comments
Pair Programming Matrix / Board
Pair Programming Matrix is a tool that helps the team to visualize the Pair Programming procedure. It shows who worked with whom, and who has not worked with anyone else at all.
Set up a board, that has a matrix with team Continue reading
Posted in Agile, SCRUM, development, pair programming, programming style
Tagged Agile, LEAN, pair programming, pair programming matrix, SCRUM
13 Comments
Scrum developers’ glossary
Well, I’ve been in SCRUM and Lean principles for the past 18+ months, and I thought maybe it makes sense to present to outside world a glossary of keywords that we use in our day to day work. Scrum developer’s … Continue reading
Posted in Agile, SCRUM
Tagged Agile, LEAN, SCRUM, scrum master, software development, team, user storyt
22 Comments
Fighting the Software Uncertainty principle. SCRUM+TDD+CI+SELENIUM+cfEngine
“The outcome of the execution of E-type software entails a degree of uncertainty, the outcome of execution cannot be absolutely predicted”, or more fully, “Even if the outcome of past execution of an E-type program has previously been admissible, the … Continue reading
How to come up with a correct Commitment: Sprint Roadmap
How to start the sprint? What User Story is the right one to start to work on? The successful result of a sprint depends on many different factors. It depends on how correctly the team has estimated, how good the commitment has … Continue reading
Posted in Agile, SCRUM, Uncategorized
Tagged Agile, conflicting user stories, LEAN, product owner, SCRUM, scrum master, sprint roadmap, user story
6 Comments