Scrum

Reflecting the Pain of Unrealistic Deadlines

Unrealistic deadlines can be highly stressful. One approach to dealing with them is to reflect the pain back.

Lessons Learned from Organizing a Scrum Master Community of Practice

I helped to organize a large (60+) Scrum Master community of practice. Some of the lessons learned include:

Acceptance Criteria

Acceptance criteria are story-specific requirements that must be met for the story to be completed. They are a technique for adding functional detail to user stories. Acceptance criteria are often added during backlog refinement or during the sprint planning meeting.

Using a Kanban Board for Synchronization

A Kanban board helps developers synchronize their work.

Scrum teams take user stories into sprints.

For many teams that is the end of the conversation. They do not need anything else to describe the work they are doing and the requirements they plan to do in the future.

For other teams, particularly those with a long product backlog, it may be beneficial to use other terms for requirements. Terms like 'epic' and 'theme'.

The following are some common Scrum myths.

Velocity is a measure of performance

Isn't a higher velocity a sign of a more productive team?

The Scrum guide is very clear that velocity is purely about establishing the likely capacity of a team for future sprints. The actual value is irrelevant, it is the predictability that is important.

Nothing else in Scrum generates more confusion than story points. So what are they and just as importantly, what are they not? Here is my definition:

Story points represent the relative difficulty in completing development tasks that produce business value

The showcase is a critical part of Scrum. It is a window in to the project for the business users and will often determine their attitude and approach to the Scrum team. Done badly, a showcase will alienate stakeholders and disrupt the team's progress.

Too many developers hated planning because the plan had never been of any personal benefit to them. Instead, plans were often used as weapons used against the developers

- Succeeding with Agile, Mike Cohn

The Daily Scrum is one of the Scrum ceremonies. It is also often called the daily stand-up or just the stand-up.

What is a stand-up?

The idea in holding a daily stand-up is to get the Scrum Team members talking to each other. The stand-up is there to coordinate dependencies, to identify issues and to fascilitate team members helping each other out.