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Agile and Offshore: Asking for Trouble?
Kevin Coleman told his story working with an offshore team that claimed to be 'Agile' and the woes and worries that came with that experience in last month's issue of the Agile Journal. Several readers validated his experience with their own. In practice, can Agile methods be used successfully with offshore teams given today's business reality?
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Venture Capital Group Acknowledges Overtime Detrimental to Scrum
Sustainable pace is known to help teams with improved velocity. Jeff Sutherland and Clinton Keith quote studies to prove that it works. However, there is an underlying word of caution which suggests that teams should take their sprint goals seriously and a couple of crunch sprints might not hurt after all.
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Story-Focused Standups
A widely accepted agile practice is the daily standup meeting, in which each team member shares: what they have done since the previous standup, what they expect to achieve by the next, and anything that is getting in their way. Mike Cohn recently examined variations that shed additional light on the progress being made toward completing each user story.
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What is Sprint Zero? Why was it Introduced?
Some teams use a Sprint 0 to prepare their product backlog, the infrastructure (development environment, CI server), ... .Is this part of Scrum? Is it useful?
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Presentation: Extremely Short Iterations as a Catalyst for Effective Prioritization of Work
Mishkin Berteig presents a situation where he proposed to a software development team, which just started to experiment with Scrum, to accept 2-days iterations. The approach was trying to tackle their organizational lack of prioritization resulting in constant crisis. Their decision led to a bigger crisis which exposed the need for task prioritization.
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Making Retrospective Changes Stick
Agile teams may find it easy to talk about change during their retrospectives, but not so easy to make that change actually happen. Esther Derby, well-known thought-leader on the human aspects of software development, recounts an experience from her personal improvement efforts to illustrate this and offer a few suggestions on how to succeed with making change actually happen.
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Article: "Who Do You Trust?" by Linda Rising
During Agile 2008, Dr. Linda Rising held a presentation centered on experiments conducted many years ago, presenting how deep, powerfully affecting, and difficult to avoid are human “prejudices” and “stereotypes” as seen from the perspective of psychology and cognitive science. The article, written by Tsutomu Yasui, is a summary of that presentation.
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How to Handle Unfinished Stories?
It is not uncommon for a scrum team to get to the end of the sprint and find that they have a story that has been worked on, but is not yet done. Perhaps the story appears to be about 80% done. What should become of such stories and how should the progress made on them be tracked? These are questions that every agile team will face. In a recent blog post, David Starr shares his approach.
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Presentation: When Working Software Is Not Enough: A Story of Project Failure
In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Mitch Lacey talks about a real life project that was on the verge of being successful, but was deemed as unsuccessful by the customer. Considering that "the true measure of project progress is working software", Mitch and his team delivered the software, but the client was not satisfied.
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When is Ok to Break the Rules
In “Just Ship Baby” Kent Beck, author of the JUnit Framework, reminds us that the point of all the Agile processes and practices is to produce shipping software. If they’re getting in the way of shipping software – then perhaps you need to break the rules.
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Announcement: Agile Journal Making Big Changes
Going into it's third year of operations, the Agile Journal is making some note-worthy changes to how it brings "need-to-know information and resources" to the agile community. Among these changes are a new Editor in Chief, Amr Elssamadisy, as well a fresh new content format and publishing approach.
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Is a "Sprint" Detrimental to an Agile Transition?
Joe Kreb's says that the term "sprint" in Scrum is detrimental to successful Agile transitions. "On the one side, a sprint may convey the wrong message in an organization among executives and the team alike. It requires, however, little explanation because everyone knows a sprint is short. It could simply mean, we are "fast", but it could also mean "over-time" or "aggressive schedules". "
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Lego Is Not Just For Kids Anymore
Lego blocks have been used for playing and building interesting structures. Michael Hunger and Takeshi Kakeda show how Lego blocks can be used as effective information radiators.
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Can Authors Use Agile Methods?
Can Agile methods be used to write a book? For a growing number of authors (Lisa Crispin, Janet Gregory, Alistair Cockburn, James Shore, Shane Warden and Jurgen Appelo) the answer is resounding yes.
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Agilists Certifying Agilists, "We Vouch For..."
A relatively longstanding topic of debate within the agile community has been that of "agile certification", namely the question of how, if at all, it could be done reliably and effectively. The "We Vouch For..." initiative represents a unique approach to answering this question.