User stories and story points A user story is a description of functionality at the lowest level of granularity that can be independently developed and demonstrated to generate feedback. Since, in Scrum, we focus on developing the smallest increm...

Considering the increasing number of companies practicing Agile, getting a ScrumMaster on the rolls has almost become mandatory. Consequently, lot of people (including PMPs) are getting themselves certified as ScrumMasters (or Certified Scrum Deve...

The top priority for a ScrumMaster should be to remove anything impeding his team to progress, in other words the impediments. In his article, Ilan Goldstein defines an impediment as “An event that impedes the ability of any of the team members to work to their estimated sprint capacity.” The post starts with a list of possible impediments that includes ungroomed product backlog, absent product owner holding up key decisions or broken build. The most interesting part of the post is however the six step approach to deal with Scrum impediments ...

I recently was asked this question: Typically, does the ScrumMaster have stories in any given sprint that track for iteration planning, backlog refinement, or any other sprint/Scrum tracking activities? Or does the ScrumMaster's time fall outside...

There is no definite consensus on the need for risk management within the Agile method. This has led many to believe that risk management is irrelevant in an iterative model. Some follow the approach of ignoring risks until they manifest into issu...

Before anyone wants you to make an app for them, make sure they watch this video: slides available here: 

VersionOne has announced the availability of its Spring 2013 release. With the introduction of a new Portfolio Timeline and enhanced Conversations, the new release extends VersionOne’s enterprise agile offering to help customers improve organizational visibility and collaboration and simplify coordination of their agile portfolio management (APM) initiatives. The new Portfolio Timeline allows Project Management Offices (PMOs) and project leaders to quickly get a high-level view of their portfolio of business initiatives, enabling them to see progress and identify at-risk projects. The Portfolio Timeline also allows program and project managers to ...

Klaus Bucka-Lassen discusses the estimation with story points in Scrum. Story points are a different way to estimate features in Scrum. Story points are a measurement of a feature’s size relative to other features and not a measure of the time needed to complete a feature. Video Producer: http://gotocon.com/Further reading on Agile estimation * Story Points: Why are they better than hours? * Why I Don’t Use Story Points for Sprint Planning * Transitioning From Time-Based to Relative Estimation * Stop Using Story Points * Relative Estimation Communication

The developers of Project Open, an open source enterprise project management package, have announced they are releasing version 4.0 of the software application after extensive testing of the release candidate. Among the new interoperability features of the package is the ability for projects to be imported into Project Open from Microsoft Project, edited in Project Open and then exported back to Microsoft Project. The software now has a configuration wizard to simplify integrating Active Directory and SharePoint, which will allow projects to store their documents on a SharePoint server. The Linux ...

In Scrum: The Unity of Knowing and Doing, I discussed the two basic abilities of human beings: knowing and doing. In terms of Scrum, inspection is about knowing, adaption is about doing, and transparency unites knowing and doing. From a team persp...

The Definition of Done is an agreement between the Scrum team and the product owner on a minimum quality barrier for the product that’s being built. Establishing a minimum quality barrier has much wider implications than just better quality product, although that is one outcome of having a Definition of Done. This article is about the impact of a definition of done on the types of contract that Agile teams work with. Author: Kane Mar, Scrum Coach, http://scrumology.com What is a Definition of Done? At its most conceptual level the Definition of ...

I would like to pose the question, Why not merge roles in Scrum? I'll begin not by talking about Scrum specifically, but by taking a different approach and using an example. The world of colors We recognize three primary colors: red, blue, and...

Running continuously sprint retrospectives while keeping the Scrum team awareness during this activity is one of the biggest challenge for ScrumMasters. In this article, Marc Nazarian present an game called “Turn the tables” that should help the ScrumMaster to achieve this objective. This game is a simple exercise where team members write on red and green cards two things that went well during the sprint and two things that could be improved in just one or two words. The interesting part of the game is that these cards are then passed ...