The “rightsizing” of user stories occurring during the planning of the next sprint in Scrum is not always an easy task to perform. Inexperienced teams have difficulties to split user stories into smaller chunks that still deliver business value and would rather use technical criteria. In this blog post, “Specifications by Example” author Gojko Adzic provides a new approach to achieve this goal using the hamburger as a reference. You identify the tasks making up a user story. Then you use this breakdown to identify different levels of quality for ...

Replay Solutions announced the ReplayDIRECTOR JIRA Connector, a new integration with one of the world’s leading project management and software issue tracking systems. Widely used by agile software teams, JIRA has proven to be one of the most effective tools for software teams worldwide with over 20,000 customers. The ReplayDIRECTOR JIRA Connector reduces defect resolution time and effort by providing three key benefits. When a software defect occurs, the ReplayDIRECTOR JIRA Connector will: 1.Automate the collection of logs, screenshots, DB, and user activity in JIRA 2.Provide 1-Click to reproduce any defect from JIRA ...

During Scrum adoption, people tend to get away from tasks and activities that they don’t like in traditional projects like documentation or writing proper code comments. In this article, a ScrumMaster shares his experience with a “no documentation” approach. He learned the hard way that minimal documentation is better than no documentation in Scrum projects. The team can decide on a case-by-case basis what level of documentation for which components and code logics is needed.

Should you track individual performances in Scrum and how do you do it? Nanda Vivek says that there is only one answer and this is “No”. Measuring individual productivity is against the spirit of Scrum and the article discusses the importance of being helpful and collaborative in teams. The author however does not give guideline on how to deal in this case with the individual review that is a common practice in many large organizations.

Pair programming is an extreme programming technique that should help Scrum teams to build better software: two heads are better than one, they say, and thus two heads will usually produce a higher-quality system. This article presents the benefits of this technique for the team, the developers and the managers that will appreciate the value of a true team that works well together, collaborates and continuously improves the code base.

This article presents the IBM perspective on top five lessons learned about scaling Agile in a leading insurance provider. These lessons were that a team-by-team, incremental approach is best. Measurement and management tools can help you get and sustain executive buy-in and improve the development process. Mentoring and coaching should be provided for the process first and for the tools second. Integrated tools help demonstrate value. Retrospectives are essential for continuous improvement.

Jama Software, the leader in collaborative requirements management solutions, announced the availability of the Jama Connector for Rally, an integration between Jama Contour and Rally Software, two industry-leading solutions for enterprise organizations adopting Agile practices. Businesses choose Agile to speed time to market of their products, and to stay nimble and responsive to constantly changing customer needs. As development cycles accelerate, it is more important than ever that project teams ensure development activities align with business priorities. At the core of Agile is the need for real-time communication and decision ...

Companies that transition to Agile often adopt the analogy that sprints are just mini waterfall. This article provides five reasons why Scrum sprints are not mini-Waterfall. Each argument is illustrated by a diagram that provides a clear visual evidence of the difference between the Agile approach and a traditional process. These reasons are:   Continuous design, development, integration, and testing   Cross-functional team members   No change in scope during Sprint   Time boxing   A strictly defined cadence

Planning Poker is an Agile practice that harnesses the “wisdom of the crowd”. The goal of planning poker is not to derive an exact and accurate estimate that would stand all future scrutiny, but rather, to obtain a group estimate in a fast, cost effective and collaborative way. Video Producer: http://www.agileacademy.com.au/

As Agile and Scrum are adopted by an increasing number of companies, this book from Craig Larman and Bas Vodde provides important thinking tools to remind us that it is more important to “be agile” than to “do agile”. Scrum or Lean are frameworks that we can use for continuous improvement of our software development process and not tools that should be applied blindly like cooking recipes.  The first part of the book discusses Systems and Lean Thinking, along with the concept of false dichotomies. A false dichotomy is an artificial ...

The Scrum Burndown chart is very simple tool to monitor the project status. It is easy to explain, easy to understand. But this metric also put in evidence some pitfalls observed in many agile workshops and adoptions. This article discusses how to build a Scrum burndown chart and what should be included in it. It also presents guidelines on how to assess the project status using the burndown chart and what could be done when problems are detected.

We are a middle-sized organization of coaches, consultants and developers – and we see ourselves Agile and Lean through and through, to the core, dyed-in-the-wool, born-and-bread. Well, to be honest, we might be not. Or at least not from the beginning. Over the years, we learned a lot: * How to have self-organizing teams * How to manage our acquisitions and changes with Kanban boards * How to improve our communication with social media * How to distribute power and responsibility in a company owned by their employees And we’re not done learning yet. ...

This article focuses on the obstacles to using Agile in a distributed team environment and recommends how to counter them with what is called “de-Agile.” De-Agile is tailoring Agile to fit your team by taking out processes that don’t make sense and tweaking those that need to be modified to suit your needs. In a distributed team environment, de-Agile is mostly about removing the sense of being distributed. You need to educate each team member about the additional communication responsibilities required when working with remote team members and emphasize the ...

Does the term “documentation” have any place in an agile environment? The goal on agile projects is to keep documentation as simple as possible, relying on roadmaps, overviews and concepts rather than enterprise-focused details. But what happens when using an agile approach on more complex projects? For example, what if the team that writes the software is different from the team that must maintain it? Or what if auditors come calling? In these instances, basic agile documentation based on user stories alone may come up short. This article provides insights ...

This article discusses estimation techniques for teams that are adopting Scrum. The authors recommend to use story points during the release planning phase, but initially to switch to hours to estimate tasks during the sprint planning. Then the team will gradually move to using story points to estimate complete stories that members will commit for in next sprint.

This video tells the story of a project that was in a bad shape after a first waterfall attempt and 2 months of Scrum that failed to deliver any working code. This talk shares the technical practices adopted and how they evolved but mainly focuses on what it took to make the project work in a big organisation with the typical command-and-control mindset It discuss attitude and culture of people on the team and how our values worked against the values exhibited by other teams. Video Producer: http://agilece.com/

The new version v6.50 of freeware tool Sprintometer for Scrum and XP project management has been released on Jabuary 21, 2012. Everybody knows Sprint Burn down chart used in Scrum projects but very often managers need to know situation with the whole agile project and specifically they are interested in Project Burn down chart. New version of Sprintometer allows this! How it works: go to tab called ‘Scope Chart’ on project level and enter percentage for already estimated sprints in relation to the whole project scope. Sprintometer will automatically generate Burn down ...

Introducing Scrum in organizations is not always easy as there is always resistance to change. This article presents the implementation of an hybrid approach to make the transition to Scrum easier in a German context. After having identified the lack of requirements documentation as an obstacle to Scrum adoption, the author proposes different workarounds that allow to minimize this fear. Even if there is a risk that teams might stick with the hybrid approach, he considers that this is a valid alternative to the “total Scrum” adoption road and that ...

When properly implemented, the Scrum framework enforces simple constraints that lead a team to self-organize into a state that achieves 5 to 10 times performance improvement versus traditional approaches. However, the majority of Scrum teams is unable achieve this objective. Teams do not know how to sequence work to deliver working software at the end of a sprint. They do not know how to work with a Product Owner to get the backlog in a ready state before bringing it into a sprint and do not know how to self-organize into ...

Uppsala, Sweden, January 19, 2012 – Hansoft, the leading vendor of tools for defect tracking, agile and lean development, has successfully launched Hansoft 6.7, including a readymade integration with JIRA. Hansoft 6.7 bridges tools and methodologies with improved features and SDK capabilities. One of the most significant new features is a full, readymade integration with JIRA, which allows entire organizations to work together in real time despite using different tools. “Hansoft is already known for its ability to manage different methodologies in parallel, a functionality we have further improved in this ...