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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…
Agile Engineering practices are not new. They originate from extreme programming back in the late 90s. XP specifically calls out these practices as things you should be doing. And here we are 20+ years later still trying to get teams to adopt them. Why is that? We do Scrum not XP People might find these practices…
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…
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…