Author: Rick Tonoli
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Tools…
Ok, first of all I’m a strong advocate of NOT using tools and applications to run Scrum, and that Scrum is about people, communication, visibility and transparency and that the best way to achieve this is to scream it out to the world on a nice white board, after all, you should have nothing to…
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Done?
This is always a highly contentious and relative subject, what does a team mean when it’s DONE? This sort of popped into my head a while ago when I was contemplating how a person would go about making sure a team is actually performing as best they could, without interfering. My question was this, because…
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Retrospective
Ran the first retrospective today, the team seemed a bit apprehensive but eventually started talking, but only after alot of coaxing, which for me bordered on interfering again, but what else could be done? I explained the point behind a retrospective, to see what we did well, and where we could improve; I tried to…
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Are you really Agile?
I found this interesting article by James Shore:The Decline and Fall of Agile which essentially talks along the subject of people claiming to be “agile” but are not really and having this potentially destroying the true “agile” drive. People should be careful that they don’t just grab at buzzwords and ideas without realizing what they’re…
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How not to run a daily scrum…
Boris has a particularly interesting and funny video on his blog post: 5 min on Scrum | The 4. Question in a Daily Scrum showing how NOT to run a Daily Scrum. I found it particulary amusing because of the similartities between it and our own Daily Scrums. I highly recommend viewing it.
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Silos
Someone told me something interesting the other day…”Silo’s destroy Scrum”, which I found interesting but never fully understood the impact until today. We’re approaching the end of our sprint and only one of the stories has been completed, a severe bottleneck was building up with the test work and when the team approached the “tester”…
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Too involved….
Without realizing it I’ve become too involved in the team, almost interfering in the Daily Scrums I suppose. It’s difficult coming from a technical background not to want to interject and comment on what people are saying. How do you approach the scenario where you have information that may be of value to the team…
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ScrumMaster and Parenting
Today I sat watching my daughter sleeping and thought about just how similar the role of ScrumMaster is to that of (what I consider proper) parenting, more so from a father’s point of view. A team is like a child, you don’t interfere with their exploration and understanding of the project but rather give guidance,…
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Scrum in a Nutshell
I found a nice, concise, description of SCRUM here: Scrum – a knol by Dan R Greening I found particularly interesting the first comment made that clarified my questions regarding the fundamental difference of the feature/story point estimation vs the task/hours estimation techniques. It appears that the reason is pretty much around the comfort of…
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Change…
As predicted an item was removed from the sprint backlog and then added a day later. I guess this is a symptom of bad planning and lack of vision by the Product Owner(s)? Or the fact that they don’t communicate between themselves? I’ve tried to explain to the BA (whose acting as a voice for…