We all know that scrum teams are made up of individuals with cross functional skills that commit to completing the sprint backlog as a team. Instead of a traditional Project Manager assigning tasks, the team decides how they are going to get the work done and individuals choose or sign up for the work they want...
The weather today will most likely be the same as the weather tomorrow Yesterday’s weather is an Extreme Programming (XP) term to keep teams from over committing during sprints and iterations. Yesterday’s Weather is a Scrum pattern that helps Teams quickly calculate how many Points they will likely complete in the upcoming Sprint. The name comes from the fact that...
The definition of process efficiency is essentially “the amount of effort or input required to produce your business’s product.” For instance, if it takes 300 workers to make a single pack of gum, your process efficiency is abysmal. And you should get out of the gum manufacturing business. But if you have 300 workers and...
Viewed from Agile, the Scrum velocity is a measure of a team’s productivity towards delivering features over time. Velocity is calculated by Story Points in a Fibonacci Viewed from Agile, the Scrum velocity is a measure of a team’s productivity towards delivering features over time. Velocity is calculated by Story Points in a Fibonacci Scale. Agile...
In software development, effort estimation is the process of predicting the most realistic amount of effort (expressed in terms of person-hours or money) required to develop or maintain software based on incomplete, uncertain and noisy input. Time estimation of software development tasks without statistics doesn’t work. I would also argue that the time, cost, and effort required to estimate and track time...
As a project manager, a scrum master, a team lead, or even as an agile coach I’ve wondered from time to time about the true value that I bring to a team. You see, to me it is entirely plausible that a team could work just fine without any of the aforementioned roles being present....
Agile transformation, undoubtedly two words that strike fear into the heart of any product organization. It should be an exciting time, with tough conversations, compromises, and hopefully good progress. But even if you successfully form a single team, there’s another problem… the rest of the organization has no idea how to deal with you. There...
Many teams have at least a moderate ability to plan and control their time. They’re able to say, “We will work on these things over the coming sprint,” and have a somewhat reasonable expectation of that being the case. And that’s the type of team we encounter in much of the Scrum literature–the literature that...
…you are ready to embark on a Sprint, and you are planning it in Sprint Planning. The objective of a Sprint is to deliver value to the stakeholders. However, simply following a list of Sprint Backlog Items (SBIs; e.g., tasks) does not necessarily result in the creation of the greatest value possible. Because the team lays out its work plan...
I had an interesting incident while working with one of the organizations. One of the project managers was very happy the way his team was performing. When he came to me, he said, “My team is doing really good these days. They started with a lot of features in gone few sprints and their estimates...
