InfoQ Homepage Scrum Content on InfoQ
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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.
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Scrum Certification Test
On many occasions various members of the agile community have complained that the Scrum Certification is meaningless because almost everyone who takes the class gets a certificate. As of Jan 1. 2009 that will no longer be the case.
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"Sprint": a Misnomer?
One of agile development's most fundamental concepts is working "iteratively" - running a project by delivering progressively better versions of the product at recurring interim milestones. Each methodology has its metaphoric label for this; the two most prevalent are XP's "iteration" and Scrum's "sprint". Kevin Schlabach talks about how the word "sprint" may be a bad metaphor.
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Agile Games for Learning
At Agile 2008, Don McGreal and Michael McCullough ran a session that showed how to use games and exercises to help improve our understanding of Agile principles and practices. After the conference they created the Tasty Cupcakes as a repository for all Agile games.
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Handling Absence in Scrum Teams
Absence of a team member whether planned or unplanned can potentially affect the velocity of an Agile team. A discussion on the Scrum Development group tries to find ways to deal with absence.
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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.