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  • Multiple Projects, One Agile Team

    It's not uncommon for an organization to have one group of developers who need to complete multiple projects. In those situations, how should the group be structured, and how should their work be planned and allocated?

  • InfoQ Interview: Jeff Sutherland on "Who's Doing Scrum"

    There are over 10,000 Scrum Masters trained, that's a lot of Scrum! Well: Scrum, variants of Scrum, and Scrum-like processes. Are these distinctions important? Jeff Sutherland told us why he thinks it's important to understand a team's level of adoption - not to label it but to continue improvement. He cited the example of organically growing a Scrum team practice-by-practice at Google AdWords.

  • Presentation: Implementing Scrum In A Distributed Software Development Organization

    At Agile2007 we heard the tale of a distributed Scrum project with 50 people in 4 continents. BMC Identity Management decided to build their next generation product, including architectural changes and component integration, using Scrum to handle the uncertainty of their product's requirements. This presentation talks about how.

  • ScrumWorks Pro adds Jira, Bugzilla Integration, new Burndown Features

    Danube technologies has delivered the Summer '07 release of ScrumWorks Pro, which includes Bugzilla and Jira integration, burndown charts with theme filtering and more options for projecting and trending, as well as other features. InfoQ reports and speaks with Danube technologies.

  • Iteration Types

    What is an iteration in the Agile world? How is it different than previous ways the software community has performed iterations? Are there different types of iterations, and does it matter? The ScrumDevelopment list has been recently discussing type A, B, and C sprints (sprint = iteration in Scrum terminology) as defined by Jeff Sutherland and the ideas are relevant the the wider Agile community.

  • InfoQ Interview: Experiences with Planning Poker

    In this fourteen-minute interview, Nils Haugen described "Planning Poker," a simple mechanism for arriving at estimates collaboratively, which has additional team building benefits and improves team estimates over time. Haugen shared his views on why this technique is an important tool for Agile teams in this InfoQ interview.

  • Agile Team Size

    Using Agile methods with large teams is a reality - the old Agile = Small Team equation is no longer valid. Nonetheless, team size is still an issue. How important is team size and what, if anything, should we do about it?

  • Are Agile Development Practices Detrimental to Architecture and Design?

    Is iterative and incremental development à la Agile practices - where one builds only what is required per iteration - detrimental to good design? Does Scrum encourage ignoring architectural issues? Can design and architecture evolve effectively without the technical Agile practices? Does test-first development lead to good design? Or does the red-green-refactor loop stall at local-minima?

  • InfoQ Presentation: DSDM and Lean Explained

    This second Agile2006 Agile Styles video looks at DSDM and Lean. Jean Tabaka covered the history and principles of the venerable DSDM methodology, founded in 1994 and now accepted in the UK for use on government contracts. Mary Poppendieck gave real examples of how the 7 Lean principles provide competitive advantage, and discussed the relationship between quality, speedy delivery and low cost.

  • Agile Measurement - A Missing Practice?

    Tom Gilb and Lindsey Brodie have written an article that suggests that Agile methods have a major weakness - that of lack of quantification. They argue that all qualities can be expressed quantitatively and present a new process, PLanguage, which looks very much like Scrum with an explicit measurement step. Are they right? Are Agile methods such as Scrum and XP in need of explicit measurement?

  • InfoQ Book: Scrum and XP from the Trenches

    Henrik Kniberg last year published wildly popular paper 'Scrum and XP from the trenches' in which he chronicled in pictures and text how his 40 person development team implemented parts of Scrum/XP over a one year period. Henrik has updated his work and published a new version of it as a full book with InfoQ.com.

  • Microsoft Releases eScrum 1.0 TFS-based Project Management Tool

    Microsoft has released eSCRUM 1.0, a Web-based project management tool for Scrum built on the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server platform. Project interaction is via web-based UI, Team Explorer, Excel, or Project. It provides a single place for all Scrum artifacts such as product backlog, sprint backlog, task management, retrospective, and reports.

  • Is Scrum Atomic?

    An article on the ScrumAlliance website asked what it means to be practicing Scrum and answered that you must be doing all of the Scrum practices for this to be true. Most of the comments left agreed with that sentiment, and a few did not. So, is Scrum indivisible?

  • The Agile Alliance Takes an Official Position on Certification

    The discussions that have been happening in distributed pockets of the community regarding certification of Agile processes has prompted the Agile Alliance to take a stance. Their position is employers should have confidence only in certifications that are skill-based and difficult to achieve. That means that certifications such as Certified Scrum Master and DSDM Foundation do not pass muster.

  • Debate: Is Scrum Master Certification Good for the Agile Community?

    The certification debate has surfaced again. Members of Industrial XP mailing list have been discussing whether the Certified Scrum Master (CSM) program is good or bad for our community. Ken Schawber, Joshua Kerievsky, Robert Martin, and many others have weighed in on this discussion, with very diverse opinions.

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