Assessing the Scrum Burndown Chart

The Scrum Burndown Chart displays the remaining effort for a given period of time in agile projects. The Burndown chart is very simple, but people tend not give appropriate attention to understand what it says. The article on Understanding the Scrum Burndown Chart provides some guidelines on how to build and to interpret the Scrum Burndown Chart. Management is interested by the improvement of velocity, but they should understand that velocity is not a KPI by which you should measure your team, it is just capacity planning tool.

Sprints or Iterations?

The short cycles provided by Scrum give us with a wealth of benefits in terms of fast feedback, minimal design in process and increased flow. However, plan driven sprints stress teams, force good people to make bad decisions. This situation does not reflect the Agile values. The video “Hating Sprints, Loving Iterations” tries to answer the questions of why do we seek 100 percent predictability in sprint planning? Why do we ignore the nature of product development? Is it fear, false expectations, lack of knowledge or simply a naive focus on sub optimization?

Watch this video on the Scrum Expert web site.

Using Tools for Agile Software Development

it is true that being agile is more a state of mind than a process. It could however be useful to use some tools for agile software development when you try to apply the technical practices that are linked to Agile like:
* Scrum agile project management
* Behavior Driven Development(BDD) or Acceptance Testing Driven Development (ATDD)
* Continuous integration
* Code and database refactoring
A lot of commercial and open source tools have been developed to support these needs and you will find a large part of them on the web site http://www.agilesoftwaretools.com/

A New Tool for Scrum Retrospectives

The retrospective is a meeting held by an agile project team at the end of a project or process (often after an iteration) to discuss what was successful about the project or time period covered by that retrospective, what could be improved, and how to incorporate the successes and improvements in future iterations or projects. The Methods & Tools software magazine has just released an the article “Dialogue Sheets for Retrospectives” by Allan Kelly. The Dialogue Sheet is a new technique for team retrospectives. This technique involves a large sheet of paper that help to create good discussion and teamwork in Agile and Scrum projects.

Agile Requirements Levels

This interesting article by Sally Elatta discusses the clarity of requirements for software development and explains how you can use a four step process for gathering them with the four levels of agile requirements: themes, features, stories and detailed stories. The difference Agile and Waterfall is that traditional teams would gather this very detailed information upfront for ALL the stories on the backlog, where Agile teams will gather these details Just In Time for the next stories, which is one or two iterations before that story needs to be DONE.

Read this article on http://www.requirementsmanagement.net/knowledge/four-levels-of-agile-requirements/

Increasing Business Value with Lean and Agile

Simplicity is key to accelerating throughput and motivating people to deliver quality solutions that speed the realisation of business value. In this video, Jeff Smith shares his experience of infusing simplicity through the introduction of Agile and Lean principles and methodologies in an organization.

Watch this video on the Agile Scrum Videos and Tutorials directory.

Agile Conferences

The Agile 2011 Conference from the Agile Alliance has just finished, but the month of September will be full of Agile, Scrum and Lean Conferences like Agile China Conference, Agile Lean Europe (ALE) Unconference, Agile on the Beach, Agile By Example, Agile Open Southern California, AgileEE Agile Eastern Europe or
Agile Day New York,

You can find a calendar of Agile conferences on http://www.agiledays.com/

Are You a Whole Team?

This article proposes four “smells” for Scrum software development project that might indicate that you’re not optimally practicing whole-team approach.

http://www.scrumexpert.com/knowledge/are-you-a-whole-team/

Scrum Team Smells

The article “Are You a Whole Team?” proposes four “smells” that might indicate that you’re not optimally practicing whole-team approach in your Scrum software development projects.

http://www.scrumexpert.com/knowledge/are-you-a-whole-team/

Better Project Schedule Managmement with Agile

The article Managing Schedule Flaws using Agile Methods discusses several symptoms and causes of schedule flaws, presents metrics and diagrams that can be used to track your team’s progress against its schedule and describes Agile ways to address these risks.