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Business Analyst: "I am a BA on the Scrum team and I'm responsible for writing the user stories." This is another common statement I usually hear from business analysts. Check out the previous post on the who of product backlog refinement that clarifies the responsibility of the business analysts and the rest of the Scrum team.
Executive: “Of course we are agile, everyone is using Jira now!” A tool does not make you, your team, or organization Agile. I see many organization invest in tooling without investing in proper training and coaching. Our first Agile value is about focusing on individual and interactions over processes and tools. So, any tool we do…
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Business Analyst: "I just finished refining all stories for the upcoming 8 Sprints. I marked them all as Ready." This is a common statement I usually hear from business analysts. Here we need to look at the who/when/how much of product backlog refinement. We previously discussed the who of product backlog refinement and emphasized that refinement…
Developer: “We do a code freeze 2 days before the end of the Sprint so we can start testing.” A statement like this typically means the team is not applying agile engineering practices, the team doesn’t properly break out product backlog items into small vertical slices, and the team is working in a mini-waterfall approach with…
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…
Here are the top 13 patterns to split a user story. When clarifying user stories with the team during product backlog refinement, run through the following questions: 1. Can a business person understand the user story? If not, re-write it from a business perspective. 2. Does the user story include a value statement? If not, re-write…
Development Team Member: “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…