Let’s take a look at the top 5 Agile Engineering practices that are essential to succeeding with Scrum and overcoming the struggles teams face trying to deliver a Product Increment at the end of each and every Sprint. Test Driven Development (TDD) TDD is a development practice where we start with a very small automated test…
Executive: “Isn’t Scrum just a team level thing? Why do we need to train and coach the management team?” This sentiment is a common misunderstanding. However, for Scrum to be effective, it requires a change in organizational culture and operations. Without these changes, organization end up implementing Scrum-fall, Scrum-but, or Dark Scrum. It’s where everybody is…
Many teams struggle with breaking up or splitting a user story into smaller ones. Here are the top 13 patterns to split a user story that you can use when clarifying user stories with the team during product backlog refinement. Start by asking: 1. By Business or User Perspective Can a business stakeholder understand the user…
Developer: “I’m taking a bio break. I’ll mark that down as 1 point!” This of course is an exaggeration and I truly hope no team is doing this. However, team members are doing similar things when it comes to estimating using story points, especially when velocity is being tracked by upper management. When this happens, there…
Many teams struggle to deliver a Product Increment at the end of every Sprint. Here are the top 5 reasons why teams can't do that consistently: Lack of understanding of what a Product Increment is There is a general lack of understanding as to what a Product Increment is and how we build things iteratively and…
Development Manager: “Yes we are a self-organizing team. I task out all the activities and let the team decide which tasks they want to work on. I don’t assign any of the tasks myself.” Not assigning tasks is a good first step, however, it falls short of what is means to be a self-organizing Scrum team.…
I typically see teams in one of 4 stages when adopting Agile practices. The Multi-Sprint Hand-Off Teams here are working in Sprints. 2 week Sprints. They have a requirements Sprint, a Design Sprint, a Coding Sprint and a Testing Sprint. This might be better than what they were doing before but it is still taking 8…
Developer: “I don’t have much to do. I’m still waiting on the BAs to finish writing the user stories. They always hold us back!” A comment like this highlights siloed thinking among team members. There are only 3 accountabilities in Scrum. A Product Owner, a ScrumMaster, and Developers. Note that Scrum does not mention business analysts,…
Customer interviews are key to understanding our users and validating product ideas early. Here are 5 customer interview rules to follow when conducting problem interviews with customers in order to validate a particular hypothesis. 1. Do the interviews in person, 1 person at a time Interviewing in person and focusing on an individual helps establish a…
Scrum Master: “Are you sure it’s going to take this long? The product owner wants it done in the next Sprint and I already told her it won’t be a problem.” I have 3 issues with this kind of statement. First, it seems that the Scrum Master is acting as the intermediary between the Product Owner…
Developer: “Last Sprint I delivered 18 story points all on my own!” This post will not be about story points. I will leave the story points are evil discussion for another time. Instead, I want to focus on the intent behind such a statement. And by intent, I am referring to the proud declaration and feeling…
Join us for the April 18-19, 2020 weekend online Certified ScrumMaster® (CSM®) training class in Washington DC. This course is a 2 day live online immersive training and learning experience that covers Agile values and Agile principles, the fundamentals of Scrum, the intricacies of the Scrum framework, Scrum roles and responsibilities, and the keys to a…
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Bizarro Scrum is like Bizarro world where everything appears to be the opposite of what it should be. It is about common day to day situations that a lot of Scrum teams experience when they transition to Scrum. In this Tales of the Bizarro Scrum blog series, I’ll highlight statements that team members make that on…
The Agile 2020 conference is the Agile Alliance's main North America conference with over 2000 attendees that gather from around the word to learn, share and collaborate on all things Agile. This was scheduled for Orlando on July 20th through July 24th. The Agile Alliance is currently exploring options for holding the conference virtually. Find out…