InfoQ Homepage Best Practices Content on InfoQ
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Scrum Does Not Have a ProductMaster Role
A common question across multiple forums is about the acceptability of combining the ScrumMaster and Product Owner role. While most Agilists believe that these roles are like oil and water, there are situations where combining them might be inevitable.
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Handling Team Changes
Change is constant, yet people fear change. It is mostly the fear of unknown and loss of comfort zones that makes the perception of a change painful. Though Agile teams are well prepared for change, however most of them are not comfortable when the change affects the team.
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Motivation 3.0: McGregor’s Theory Y Can Work
McGregor’s theory X suggests that employees are inherently lazy and will avoid work if they can and that they inherently dislike work. Thus, they need to be closely supervised. Theory Y suggests that employees may be ambitious and self-motivated and exercise self-control.Most Agile teams would like to be associated with theory Y. Mike Griffiths suggested how this might be easy to achieve.
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Backlog Grooming: Who, When and How
Backlog grooming as the name suggests is giving regular care and attention to a product backlog so that it does not get ugly and unwieldy like an unattended garden with weeds. Though, it is not a formal process of Scrum, however, Ken Schwaber recommended reserving five percent of every sprint for this activity. A recent discussion on the Scrum Development group discussed and debated the process.
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Most Effective Team Structure
Agile talks about small team sizes with the magic numbers of 7 plus minus 2. Agile also recommends whole teams. Whole team is a concept that advises for having sufficient skills within the team itself to get the job done. Thus the development team has the testing skills, database skills, user interface skills, apart from the core development skills. Is defining the team structure this easy?
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Rules for Better Retrospectives
James Carr recently published a list of five rules to help improve the effectiveness of retrospectives. The rules are based on his experiences in hundreds of retrospectives, both successful and not.
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Comparing Velocity Across Teams
A common project management criticism is that since the story points vary across teams, there is no way to ascertain one teams progress with respect to the other. Amongst Agilists there is a general consensus that comparing velocity across teams is an anti pattern and is best avoided lest the overall productivity should suffer.
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Overlapped or Synchronized Sprints?
When a Scrum project grows, so do the team members. The suggested way of managing a growing team is to split the team into multiple teams keeping in line with the Agile recommended team sizes. However, there could be multiple communication and coordination problems when each team starts working in a sprint of their own.
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Reasons for Delay in an Agile Project
A delay, in general, is getting something done later than it was scheduled for thereby causing distress and inconvenience. Likewise, a delay is considered to be a waste in the Agile terminology. A delay causes discontinuity and thereby causes other wastes like relearning, task switching etc. A few Agilists discuss the common delays and ways to resolve them.
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When Agile Success is Eventually a Failure
It is often assumed that once the pilot Agile teams are successful, the process of Agile adoption is on the right track. Dave Nicolette shares very intriguing insights into situations where the adoption failed even after very successful pilot implementations.
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Tips to Select a Pilot Project for Agile Adoption
One of the most important factors which influences the success of Agile adoption is the set of learnings derived by applying Agile to a pilot project. These learnings significantly influence the organization to go ahead with Agile or fall back to their usual process. A wrong type of pilot could end up aborting, which would be a poor advertisement for the new process.
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Who Moved Our Project Stakeholder
A project stakeholder for an Agile team is a person having a valuable stake in the success of the project and could also be potentially holding the cash strings for the project. However, sometimes it is very difficult to get time slices from the project stakeholder. In other extreme cases, the stakeholder might seem to be uninterested or completely missing in action.
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26 Hints for Successful Agile Development
Keith Swenson, recently compiled a list of 26 hints for Agile software development. Keith suggested that he frequently collects nuggets of wisdom on various topics and the list is a distilled set of hints which really matter for Agile software development.
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97 Things Every Programmer Should Know
The 97 Things series continues, after the architect and the project manager, with things every programmer should know. InfoQ talked to its editor Kevlin Henney.
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Handling Project Termination
Terminating a sprint in Scrum is a rare event, but it does happen. An abnormal sprint termination can be called by either the team or the product owner. Most of the times terminating a sprint or the project leaves a sense of bad feeling. Robert K. Hurley and Joseph T. Jimmerson discussed the ways to deal with the trauma of a terminated project.