Scrum for Team System is a Team Foundation Server (TFS) Process Template that models the Scrum Process, providing Work Items and Reports to model the basic Scrum Artifacts. This web site provides a process and a template that allows to implement Scrum with Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server. It helps explaining and translating the Scrum concepts into TFS with the usage of screenshots and workflows. It also provides a whole suite of reports like Product Cumulative Flow or Sprint Task Cycle Time. Read the complete Scrum for Team System Guidance on http://www.scrumforteamsystem.co.uk/ProcessGuidance/

These days most dev organizations can configure themselves around agile thinking. That is only half the battle. Unless the rest of the company – be it sales, marketing, finance – also adopt the agile mindset, you risk launching misunderstood products eg. what seems like MVP to the development team, seems like buggy features to the marketing team. At its core, agile teaches us that a clear vision of the end product is not necessary. But unless the sales team is bought into dev’s vision of “get it wrong before you get ...

In Scrum, the standard format of a user story is easy to understand: “As a [role] I want [something] so that I can [benefit].” However, there is more difficulties inside the project team to agree on what constitute the content of a user story. In this blog post, Steve Johnson explores this issue. You have problems when the user stories suggest already a solution or are bug fixes for poor design. Steve Johnson suggests the following solution: “Ideally, a customer expert should tell stories about users, a usability expert will convert ...

Linda Rising shares influence strategies that you can use to more effectively convince others to see things your way. You’ve tried and tried to convince people of your position. You’ve laid out your logical arguments on impressive PowerPoint slides—but you are still not able to sway them. Cognitive scientists understand that the approach you are taking is rarely successful. Often you must speak to others’ subconscious motivators rather than their rational, analytic side. These strategies take advantage of a number of hardwired traits: * “liking” — we like people who are like ...

Rally has introduced new Rally Portfolio Manager capabilities that enable enterprises to scale Agile practices across the entire organization and help deliver more value to the market faster. The enhancements support any methodology used for scaling Agile practices, including the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe). When paired with Rally’s coaching services, Rally can uniquely help enterprises successfully transform into an Agile business that can deliver innovations to market faster and more predictably. The announcement was made this week at Rally’s annual user conference, RallyON, which brings together Agile enthusiasts from around the ...

An old project management quote says “You can’t control what you can’t measure”. This is not different when you use Scrum. In this blog post, David Koontz proposes a list of metrics that can be used to assess the activity of Scrum teams. His advice is that these metrics should be used at the team level for team self-management. he thinks that it could be counterproductive to make these metrics visible outside of the team or to use them for micromanagement. Here is a partial list of the metrics discussed in ...

Adding serious games, funware, with grain of gamification may help your team in finding creative solutions, thinking out of the box, and making them happier than ever before. Retrospective is one of those magic moments when the team is looking back at the sprint that has just ended. It’s time to celebrate all the successes and learn from failures. How to help your team to make the retrospective amazing and very beneficial experience? Adding serious games, funware, grain of gamification may help your team in finding creative solutions, thinking out of ...

The Agile Dictionary is a web site that proposes a definition of words used in Agile software development. For each word, you will find some synonyms and the origin of the word. The web site is organized alphabetically, starting from “A” with “Acceptance Test” and ending with “X” for “XP”. Each word can naturally contains other words defined in the dictionary. You will also find references to external documents. Visit the Agile Dictionary on http://agiledictionary.com/

Modern Agile software development approaches like Scrum recommend a “just in time” vision of application development that tends to make people focus only on the activities that are directly useful for the current sprint. How can you include an activity with a long-term perspective like enterprise software architecture in the iterative process of Scrum? Author: Markus van Aardt, Adamantium Software Engineering, http://www.adamantiumse.com/ Agile approaches have brought a renewal in software development and delivery practices over the last decade. Yet, iterative and incremental development methods have been around since the 1980’s and are ...

In a Scrum context, the definition of a “spike” is “a story or task aimed at answering a question or gathering information, rather than at producing shippable product.” In this article, Bill Ambrosini discusses how to manage them and when to use this activity. Spikes might be used for reducing technical debt or creating a “proof of concept”. They should have two major characteristics: 1. Have clear objectives and outcomes 2. Be timeboxed Some of the smells that might indicate that you need a spike are: * The team has difficulties to estimate the stories * ...

Atlassian has unveiled the latest version of JIRA, its project and issue management software used by more than 19,000 companies worldwide. Wrapped in a brand new, modern user interface, JIRA 6 features faster navigation and editing, simplified workflow creation and powerful mobile functionality so teams building software can get more done with less effort. To get teams up and running quickly, JIRA 6 is available OnDemand – Atlassian’s cloud offering – or behind the firewall starting at just $10 for 10 users. “We built JIRA 6 to make every software development ...

It’s fairly hard to know what solid testing is all about within Agile and Scrum teams. What traditional practices are fine to continue, which ones need modification and what totally new approaches are necessary. Moving from traditional to agile testing is often a high-wire balancing act to some degree with no clear direction. This video presents the critical lessons from teams that have successfully made the transition. We’ll explore the requisite team skills, how to deal with agile requirements, the right strategies for developing agile automation, how to plan and test ...

Backlog refinement is an important part of the Scrum team activity as it allows to gain a shared understanding of the work flow. Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) is a technique that use a business language to define acceptance testing (test cases) of requirements. In this article, Zia Malik explains how teams can use BDD to support product backlog refinement. At the beginning of each sprint, the Scrum team members and the product owner meet to discuss and write out the conditions of acceptance testing for the next-highest priority Product Backlog Item (PBI), ...

We know that self-organization is a critical aspect of every successful Agile and Scrum team and we also know that it takes trust, respect, openness and responsibility; so why many teams have a hard time to achieve it? Self-organization changes the dynamics between the manager and the team and between the teammates themselves. Resistance may arise and the source is frequently rooted in mental habits, such as a latent blaming culture, confusing guidance and command, fear of taking responsibility or losing status, unconscious agendas. Through real stories from the field and ...

Scrum Gathering® India Regional 2013 is the first ever Regional Scrum Gathering® conference in India that will take place in Pune, July 36 and 27 2013. Scrum Gathering® is the flagship conference of Scrum Alliance, the organization which provides the globally-recognized Certified ScrumMaster™(CSM) certification. For Scrum , Agile and Lean Practitioners, Scrum Gathering® India Regional 2013 is a unique opportunity to share and learn from community leaders, fellow practitioners and coaches. This is also a platform to connect to Agile gurus, thought-leaders, who’s who of Agile organizations and also to your ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...