Ken Schwaber, one of the `fathers' of Scrum, has co-authored two books on the topic with almost exactly the same title: Agile Project Management with Scrum (Microsoft Professional) and Agile Software Development with Scrum (Series in Agile Software Development) Is there any difference between the two? Are they redundant? If yes, whic...
Hi, I'm currently working on a productivity tool for Scrum teams and would like to know what is the average number of stories you see in a product backlogs at any particular time. Just to clarify the number should not include completed stories or stories which 'might' be broken into multiple stories in the future. Also I'm interested ...
Quite often I would complete numerous daily tasks i.e. not working on anything one component in particular. Therefore, I find it quite difficult to remember these individual tasks in our next day stand up meeting. Is it ok to bring a small sticky note with a few reminder points on the previous days tasks? For example, the contents of the...
Are there any web-based usable scrum backlog tools which beat excel? I'm especially interested in a product backlog feature, we can do sprint backlog just fine with post-its. The "killer feature" I'm looking for is that I can assign unique priorities for the backlog items. In Excel or text-file this is a no brainer: the order mandates th...
At which part of the Scrum process does your team make educated estimates as to the effort required to complete a given product backlog item? For example, say you have a product backlog item that says "The user will be able to supply their email address and receive an email with a link for resetting their password" scheduled for Sprint ...
Anybody tried here using Getting Real(37Signals) approach to develop windows application? (C#/.NET). Or simply put, developing project using agile. We develop windows application which sucks development time. We never get concrete UI definition from Client. We never had any decent design due to this problem or something else. How do yo...
We are looking at starting to do some scrum training and I was wondering if we should look at sending a couple of people to become scrum masters, or bring in a consultant to do scrum training. Also any recommendations for scrum training, either to come in or to go to? ...
Here is what the Wikipedia article on Scrum has to say about the Daily Scrum: The meeting starts precisely on time. Often there are team-decided punishments for tardiness (e.g. money, push-ups, hanging a rubber chicken around your neck). Do you feel that it is a good practice and what self-punishment have you found effective in the...
Schwaber & Beedle's 'scrum' book (and the other scrum literature I've read) seems to focus on having a releasable product by the end of the sprint. Web development for an established site (at least in our case) consists of developing 'enhancements' (of various sizes) and many small 'fixes'. Deploying (to web) only at the end of the sprin...
Let’s say product X is worth 10 story points. Development starts in sprint Y, but is not completed in time. What do you with the story points when calculating sprint Y’s velocity? Would you: a. Allocate 0 story points for sprint Y and 10 points for the sprint it is eventually completed in; b. Determine the story points for the remai...
Right now, our teams are using a combination of a bulletin board and an excel spreadsheet to keep track of tasks and to draw a burndown chart. Backlogs are keep on index cards in envelopes. This works well when the stakeholders are in the same location. However, we will soon have Scrum teams in two geographically distant locations and I...
Picture the scene, a business is thinking about using the Scrum methodology for agile development. They have implemented the Scrum for Team Systems and everyone is very happy with it. However the business wants to capitalise their development cost and have asked for Scrum backlog work item template to be modified to include the time take...
Hi, I would in an office which has been doing Agile for a while now. We use Scrum for project management and mix in the engineering practices of XP. It works well and we are constantly learning lessons and refining our processes. I would just like to tell you about our usual practices for testing and get feed back on how this could be ...
People at my company see unit testing as a lot of extra work, that offers fewer benefits than existing functional tests. Are unit and integration tests worth it? Note a large existing codebase that wasnt designed with testing in mind. ...
We work with the scrum method. Let's assume the product owner wants a new functionality that allows the user to search the content of the website. The total work is 8 points and these would be the user stories: the user can input search terms (0 points) the search results are displayed to the user (8 points) I want to gain more in...
I have seen a lot of companies buy into the Agile/Scrum process and basically use it for every project, regardless of what it is. When is Scrum not appropriate and can cause more harm than good (generally speaking)? ...
To those of you who started using scrum in your development teams: Did you maintain the traditional teams or form new ones? At our organization we are split into database, product development and frontend developers (simplified!). I am interested in whether others actually reorganized their whole team structure due to scrum or if you f...
What would you recommend as far as a good color-coding for use on a Storyboard? Is this a good pattern from your experience? http://maxheapsize.com/static/ScrumBoardCheatSheet.pdf What is the most standard color-coding? ...
Let’s say story A is worth 10 story points. Development starts in sprint 100, but is not completed by they end of the sprint. I am then assuming that you do not claim any points. A story is done or not done. And tets say your average velocity is 25pts and your team stays the same for the next iteration. So when working out your capacity ...
Recently with my coworkers we were discussing how to organize the version control in a Scrum project. More specifically, the criteria for branches creation (per developer, per task, per Story, per Sprint?) and the methods of integration. My opinion was that a useful way to organize it is to create a branch for each User Story, so you c...