Tag: scrum
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Eighth day of Christmas… Scaling agile!
On the eighth day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me: Eight Scrums a-scaling, Seven most-heard retrospective comments, Six Keystone config tips, Five Golden Rules! Four CI tools, Three powershell scripts, Two Keystone merge tips, …and a placeholder rule in the content tree. You may have found that a lot of…
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Seventh day of Christmas… most-heard retrospective comments
On the seventh day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me: Seven most-heard retrospective comments, Six Keystone config tips, Five Golden Rules! Four CI tools, Three powershell scripts, Two Keystone merge tips, …and a placeholder rule in the content tree. Over the years, I’ve sat in a lot of sprint retrospectives.…
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Can Trello Gold enhance your Scrum board?
A long time ago, in a blog post far, far away, I explored the use of Trello’s agile task tracking toolset to create a Scrum board for developer implementation. This has worked well for me over the years, especially when a project needs a little more structure than Kanban sometimes…
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Making it Work: Specialists on an Agile Team
In some lines of business, such as consulting, the organizational business goals require a certain amount of specialization in order to deliver to clients efficiently and with high quality. These organizations also typically bill by the hour, meaning downtime is a serious cost to the business. This can be difficult…
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Visual Studio Online agile options are opening up
Recently, Aaron Bjork wrote about some of the goodies coming down the pipe for Visual Studio Online (VSO) agile project management options. I still remember my first forays into TFS 2010, trying desperately to use it to manage my agile projects. Needless to say, I was frustrated at the time, but…
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Setting organizational expectations when implementing Scrum
When a team first transitions to an agile delivery model, the team experiences challenges and frustration as they adopt a new way of thinking and new processes. Often times, teams are told that they are making the change to agile in order to deliver software faster and cheaper, but find…
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Moving day always brings out the agile practitioner in me
Most of us have had to move ourselves at least once in our lives. We think we have it all planned out, but the true test is when the movers show up (or your friends who were lucky enough to show up and provide free labour). I got to be one…
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Going Lean: Tips from the trenches
Continuous refinement is always in need when working in an agile delivery framework. The first thing you learn when you adopt a framework is that it does not work for all situations. Scrum, like other models, works really well in particular development situations. Sometimes, however, you need to transition your team…
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How I know a project plan is total nutbars… and how it can be fixed
We have all seen the magical project plans that have no grounding in reality. Schedules are far too aggressive, scope is beyond what the team can handle, not enough resources available to properly run the team… all to meet some magical “hard deadline” that has been imposed seemingly without any…
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How Visual Studio Online won me over in under 90 minutes
For the last year or so, I’ve been living in a mostly Atlassian world: JIRA OnDemand, BitBucket, SourceTree… likely more before the year is done. Sure, I still use our on-premise TFS 2010 at work along with Visual Studio of various editions, but my ALM world has really been rocked by…
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Et tu brute? Of cargo cults and agility…
I’m not sure what triggered it, but at some point while I was on vacation a few folks started getting really ticked off about the state of “Agile” these days. People adhering to rules or tools, not understanding what it means to bring agility to a project, or building giant…
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Feeling the Product Owner’s pain
On Friday, a large group of us gathered in the office for a full day of looking at how we are currently managing our requirements over the course of a project. In the room we had folks who play the roles of technical leads, scrum masters, and product owners, all…
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Tracking hours burndown in Trello
In the past, I’ve written about some tools for doing Scrum inside of Trello, as well as some guidance on creating Scrum boards using these plugins. Recently, I received a question about how to accurately track hours spent in Trello. Zig Mandel, the man behind Plus for Trello and Spent for…
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The NFR Dilemma: Capturing Nonfunctional Requirements in the Backlog
Development teams using Scrum, or similar agile forms, will find that the constraints on the system that are represented by Nonfunctional Requirements (NFRs) can be a pain to capture and reference in product backlogs. The NFRs aren’t acceptance criteria, but the “story” isn’t really done unless it meets them. The…
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Questions on getting started with Scrum
Even though the web will have many resources available to users on how to get started with Scrum, some folks do find they need help sifting through the massive amounts of information to find what they need. Recently, I answered some questions for a person in just such a situation…
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How to set up Trello board for Scrum
In the past, I’ve written about how to use Trello for agile task tracking, and also about some tools that allow you to use Trello for Scrum. Recently I started up a little side project for a personal application I wanted to write, and I decided to run the project…
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Baby Steps to SOA: A retrospective on the blog series
One of the key needs in lean, scrum, and other agile processes is for continuous improvement. We constantly review how we do things to do them better. The most common method of doing this is the retrospective. After 5 months of writing the Baby Steps to SOA series, I decided…
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Risk Management on Agile Projects – The Risk Burndown chart
For most small Agile projects, I haven’t needed to track risks as explicitly, since the standard agile structure with impediments identified daily tends to highlight immediate problem areas. However, for larger projects and for projects working within a more traditional client environment, tracking risk logs and project risk status are…
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Using Trello for Scrum
A lot of the traffic that comes through this blog is related to folks looking to use Trello for agile development. If you are using a Kanban/Lean approach, it works really well out of the box. However, if you are using a more Scrum-like approach, you may have noticed the…
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Scrum. Difficult Conversations. Start with Prioritization.
Mike Vizdos’ post on having difficult conversations at the strategic level about Scrum and Agile is a few months old but always relevant. Whether we are trying to make the change to Agile in our own companies, or whether we are trying to work with a partner and get on…
St-Cyr Thoughts 