InfoQ Homepage Scrum Content on InfoQ
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‘Debt’ as a Guide on the Agile Journey: Organizational Debt
In this article in a series on how ‘debt’ can be used to guide an agile journey, we will provide two examples of smells that are related to organizational debt, explain the symptoms, the impact on the business and in our organization, outline the experiments (countermeasures) that we have introduced in an effort to try to remove the smell, and provide some specific advice for you to be inspired.
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Surviving Zombie Scrum
The book Zombie Scrum Survival Guide by Christiaan Verwijs, Johannes Schartau, and Barry Overeem aims to support teams that are stuck in Zombie Scrum. It helps them to understand why things are the way they are and provide them with experiments to get out of this state of Zombie Scrum by enabling collaboration with stakeholders, working increments, autonomy for teams, and continuous improvement.
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Software Systems Need Skin in the Game
Consequential decisions need to be taken by the people who pay for the consequences, by the people with skin in the game, and modern software practices need to reinforce this idea. On-call engineering is the quintessential modern engineering practice to create skin in the software development game.
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Who is on the Team?
Ahmad Fahmy and Cesario Ramos take the changes to the new Scrum Guide as an opportunity to explore what it means to be "on a team." They draw on research to create an ACID test to differentiate who is on the team and who isn't. They discuss different mental models around the idea of a team with the hopes that you take this opportunity to discuss and elevate the roles within your organization.
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Improving Organizational Agility with Self-Management
This article presents "self-management" as a possibility to natively support agility to plant seeds and let both institutions and people thrive and benefit from it. Agility may go hand-in-hand with self-management as a way to shift mindsets and open a conversation to really find new ways of working in organizations.
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Key Sprint Metrics to Increase Team Dependability
What are the questions you should be asking and what behaviours should you be measuring within your Scrum teams in order to improve overall dependability and delivery efficiency? We explore how you can transform your Sprints into the building blocks for success and ensure you can continue to meet (and even surpass) long-term user and business expectations.
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Q&A on the Book Retrospectives Antipatterns
Using the familiar “patterns” approach, the book Retrospectives Antipatterns by Aino Vonge Corry describes unfortunate situations that can sometimes happen in retrospectives. For each situation, described as an antipattern, it also provides solutions for dealing with the situation; this can be a way to solve the problem directly or avoid similar problems in future retrospectives.
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Changes in the 2020 Scrum Guide: Q&A with Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland
The Scrum Guide has been updated to make it less prescriptive, using simpler language to address a wider audience. These changes have been done to make Scrum a “lightweight framework that helps people, teams and organizations generate value through adaptive solutions for complex problems”. An interview with Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland about the changes to the guide.
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The Complexity of Product Management and Product Ownership
Doug Talbot discusses the confusion surrounding Product Ownership / Product Management. He provides some advice on tackling the complexity of creating your own contextualised and personalised product value stream for your organisation or team and using systems thinking and Cynefin for complexity.
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Applying Languages of Appreciation in Agile Teams
Respect is one of the core values of Scrum. This can be shown in many ways, including appreciation for our team members. This article introduces the concept from Gary Chapman’s book, The 5 Love Languages, and considers how this applies to our working relationships, how we identify the needs of our colleagues to feel supported and appreciated, and how this can be applied to appreciation in teams.
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Q&A on the Book Dynamic Reteaming (2-ed)
In the 2nd edition of her book Dyanamic Reteaming, Heidi Helfand shows that having stable teams is generally unrealistic and that there are ways to effectively reform teams to achieve great outcomes. She explores different approaches to team formation and reformation and provides practical advice on how to create environments where team formation can adapt and evolve effectively.
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Software Teams and Teamwork Trends Report Q1 2020
The Culture & Methods editors team present their take on the topics that are at the front of the technology adoption curve: how to make teams and teamwork more effective, in person or remote, some new tools and techniques, some ideas that have been around for a while and are starting to gain traction, the push for professionalism, ethical behavior and being socially and environmentally aware.