InfoQ Homepage Scrum Content on InfoQ
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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.
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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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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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Martin Fowler on Avoiding Common Scrum Pitfalls
Jacky Li of InfoQ China spoke with Martin Fowler during ThoughtWorks' AgileChina conference. In this print interview, Martin Fowler talked about Scrum certification and the future of Agile.
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Interview: Joshua Kerievsky about Industrial XP
In this interview taken by Sadek Drobi of InfoQ, Joshua Kerievsky, founder of Industrial Logic, talks about Industrial Extreme Programming which extends XP by including practices dealing with management, customers and developers.
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Presentation: Agile and Beyond - The Power of Aspirational Teams
In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Tim Mackinnon talks about the aspirations behind the Agile principles and practices, the desire to become efficient, to write quality code which does not end up being thrown away. Tim has a personal perspective on Agile practices and shares from his own experience.
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Presentation: 10 Ways to Screw Up with Scrum and XP
In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Henrik Kniberg talks about 10 possible reasons to fail while doing Scrum and XP. Maybe the team does not have a definition of what Done means to them, or they don't know what their velocity is, or they don't hold retrospectives.
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Scrum-ban Paper Adds Kanban to Scrum
Corey Ladas has written an interesting paper titled "Scrum-ban" in which he describes how a Scrum team might introduce the lean practice of kanban. He goes on to describe an evolutionary process, which if taken far enough, replaces most of Scrum. Even for those who don't want to scrap Scrum and go lean, the paper provides a useful view into what kanban is and how it can augment Scrum.
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Prioritizing (the Backlog) For Profit
Having difficulty prioritizing the backlog? Luke Hohmann has described a method to make quantitative decisions about which backlog items should be considered first. In addition to the usual attributes such as implementation effort, Luke suggested adding attributes to measure stakeholders needs, strategic alignment and to ask whether the item is driving profit.
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Presentation: Succeeding With Agile: A Guide To Transitioning
In this presentation filmed during Agile 2007, Mike Cohn talks about the transitioning process towards an agile organization, why the process is inherently difficult, and what it takes to see self-organization emerging in a previously tightly controlled environment.