Rick Tonoli

Tag: scrum

  • Affinity Estimation

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    Rick Tonoli
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    “Affinity Estimating is a technique many teams use to quickly and easily estimate (in Story Points) a large number of user stories. This is a great technique if you’re just starting a project and have a backlog that hasn’t been estimated yet.” I remember this topic came up during the ScrumMaster course and I found…

  • Impediment

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    Rick Tonoli
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    Impediment: That which impedes or hinders progress, motion, activity, or effect. I’ve been thinking about the negative context “impediments” are sometimes set in, I don’t think impediments are negative at all, in fact quite the opposite, they are the pointers that lead you on the path of improvement, but it all depends on how you…

  • Talking to non-agile people…

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    Rick Tonoli
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    As much as I know (or think I know) about Scrum I still find it difficult some times to communicate to non-agile (waterfall) people that are resistant to change and passionate about their point of view. An interesting article I found clarifies this a bit for me, specifically how to communicate with project managers. The…

  • Epiphany…

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    Rick Tonoli
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    Epiphany: a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or commonplace occurrence or experience. I’ve always struggled with accepting the concept of estimating using story points and NOT effort hours. I could never get my mind around the concept and yes, I’ve…

  • Done?

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    Rick Tonoli
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    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…

  • Are you really Agile?

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    Rick Tonoli
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    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…

  • How not to run a daily scrum…

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    Rick Tonoli
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    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.

  • Silos

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    Rick Tonoli
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    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”…

  • Scrum in a Nutshell

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    Rick Tonoli
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    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…

  • The (Self Organizing) Team

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    Rick Tonoli
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    The sprint planning sessions are taking long but this is because these concepts are new to the team. They need to be taught that they are the owners of their own destiny and as a team they, and only they, must move forward in this. The current way of working is way different, generally involving…