InfoQ Homepage Scrum Content on InfoQ
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Mapping Traditional Software Development Roles to Scrum
Mapping traditional software development roles to just the three roles in Scrum can be challenging. Mike Cottmeyer attempts to provide an effective mapping which would help the teams.
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Article: Lean and Agile, Marriage Made in Heaven or Oxymoron?
Dave West takes a look at the world views of the Agile and Lean communities and finds them in conflict. If true, then many of us in the community blending Lean and Agile and unaware of the inherent clash in ideals could be making some big mistakes. As an example of a manifestation of this conflict Dave takes the backlog.
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Should the Product Owner Be One Person Only?
Is the role of product owner a role that should be satisfied by only one person? There are those who say that there must be one person accountable - a single wringable neck. There are those that say that the expertise needed for a product owner cannot be satisfied by one person. There are many ideas in between about what and who a product owner should be.
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Adopting The Whole Enchilada
Recently InfoQ reported on Jim Shore's 'The Decline and Fall of Agile', which highlighted a trend for organizations to adopt "Agile" (in name) but fail to adopt what it means to be Agile (in practice). Community leaders such as Joshua Kerievsky, Martin Fowler, and Ron Jeffries have taken Shore's post a few steps further recently, posting their own thoughts on what's going on with this situation.
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Over-Commitment Versus Over-Delivery
A major goal of sprint planning is to make a commitment to what is intended to be delivered by the end of the sprint. However, many teams either over-commit or over-deliver. Both situations are considered as smells and lead to lack of predictability along with other related pitfalls. The team is required to walk a fine line between the two.
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Doing Agile After Layoffs
Part of a development team has been laid off, the team is down to four developers with a part time Scrum Master and no dedicated Product Owner. Is Scrum still applicable? What options are there? How does one adapt?
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Presentation: Embrace Uncertainty by Jeff Patton
In this original presentation from the Communitech Agile Event, Jeff Patton, winner of the Agile Alliance’s 2007 Gordon Pask Award, explains why one needs to embrace uncertainty in order to succeed with his/her Agile project and how to avoid some of the common mistakes leading to project failure.
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Challenges in Adopting Scrum
Adopting a new methodology at the organization level is prone to multiple level of challenges. In a series of articles on Agile Journal, Cesário Ramos and Eelco Gravendeel share their experiences and the challenges that they encountered with Scrum adoption.
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Can Product Owner and Scrum Master be Combined?
Many short staffed teams or small organizations consider combining the role of Scrum Master (SM) and Product Owner (PO) into one person. Is it advisable? Have other people done it? What are the options? Matt Gelbwaks, Dan Rawsthorne and Tom Mellor, among others, share their experiences.
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Scaling Scrum Without the Scrum of Scrums
Scrum has proven effective at promoting communication between members of a development team. The question of how to scale this high-bandwidth communication across teams, especially in large organizations, remains an area of active exploration and debate. Will Read has proposed a mesh-network inspired alternative to the popular Scrum-of-Scrums meeting for achieving this goal.
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Managing Change Requests in Scrum
Tracking change requests in Agile is often associated with being at odds with the Agile principle of "Responding to change over following a plan". However, in certain situations it might be necessary to track change requests. An interesting discussion on the Lean Agile Scrum group tries to look deeper into the 'Why' and 'How' of tracking change requests.
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Scrum of Scrums - Issues and Value
The Scrum of Scrums meeting "is an important technique in scaling Scrum to large project teams. These meetings allow clusters of teams to discuss their work, focusing especially on areas of overlap and integration." Allan Shalloway asked for people's experience "on Scrum-of-Scrums for coordinating teams vs scaling Scrum to the enterprise" he sees problems in with large groups (350 people).
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James Shore: The Decline and Fall of Agile
James Shore has declared agile to be in decline. He cites the many teams doing 'sprints' and stand-up meetings, without adopting any of the technical practices necessary to produce high-quality software over the long-haul. In his estimation, this has led to thousands of Scrum teams doing agile so poorly that they will almost certainly fail, and possibly take the agile movement with them.
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Presentation: Reaching Hyper-Productivity with Outsourced Development Teams
In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of Scrum, and Guido Schoonheim, CTO of Xebia, present an actual case of reaching hyper-productivity with a large distributed team using XP and Scrum.
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Addressing Nonfunctional Requirements in Scrum
Nonfunctional requirements describe qualities of a system (what it is) rather than its behaviors (what it does). Scott Ambler inspired much discussion when he recently asserted "Scrum's product backlog concept works well for simple functional requirements, but... it comes up short for nonfunctional requirements and architectural constraints." in an article on Dr. Dobb's Portal.