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May 11

3 Common Scrum Master Mistakes - Part II

Faisal Mahmood Posted by: Faisal Mahmood in Subscriptions | Comment (0)
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In the first part, we discussed common Scrum Master mistakes. Now, we will focus on some of the consequences of these mistakes, typical causes and a few ideas that can help you to avoid making these mistakes.

Following are some consequences of the Scrum Master working as a manager.

The Team becomes reliant on a single person making decisions on its behalf. It kills self-organization. The quality of the decision making takes a sound beating. The Team has to live with the decision made by one person instead of leveraging collective intelligence of all the Team members.

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May 01

3 Common Scrum Master Mistakes - Part I

Faisal Mahmood Posted by: Faisal Mahmood in Subscriptions | Comment (0)
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It is difficult for some Scrum Masters to stick to their servant leader role. Because of lack of support and limited experience, they fall back on what they know best – traditional management. Knowingly, or unknowingly, Scrum Masters keep falling into this trap. They start to behave more as project managers than as Scrum Masters.

Several symptoms indicate that the Scrum Master is struggling to let the Team self-organize. That person is acting more as a manager than as a Scrum Master. Three keys symptoms are ...

Read full article 3 Common Scrum Master Mistakes

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Apr 16

How to become a great Product Owner?

Faisal Mahmood Posted by: Faisal Mahmood in Subscriptions | Comment (0)
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Of all three Scrum roles, the Product Owner is by far the most misunderstood role. What’s the core responsibility of the Product Owner? The typical answers that come out are

  • Product Owner tells the what team what to do
  • Product Owner defines the product and the Product Backlog
  • Product Owner clarifies the vision

Well, these are all valid activities that the Product Owner needs to carry out. The Product Owner role is associated with creating user stories, providing the team with the acceptance criteria, providing feedback in the review meetings. On top of all this, better Product Owners try to work with the team during the Sprints. But the key aspect of the Product Owner role is often forgotten.

Read full article, how to become a great Product Owner.

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Apr 05

7 Reasons Why Your Team Does Not Get to Done

Faisal Mahmood Posted by: Faisal Mahmood in Subscriptions | Comment (0)
Tagged in: scrum team , scrum master , done , agile team , agile

 

Many Agile and Scrum Teams struggle with very long release cycles. Sprint after Sprint, they produce work, but the work is not shippable, it is not Done.

Seven reasons lead to Teams not getting to Done

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Apr 03

Are You Making These Retrospective Mistakes?

Faisal Mahmood Posted by: Faisal Mahmood in Subscriptions | Comment (0)

 

Continuous improvement is at the heart of Agile. Retrospectives provide opportunities to the Teams to inspect their process, and continuously improve it. Many Teams fail to take advantage of this and thus fail to improve.

Common Retrospective mistakes are

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Dec 08

-weight of the stock

yangsmile Posted by: yangsmile in Subscriptions | Comment (0)
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Sep 26

[Agile developers seek job] Senior Microsoft .Net developer (Windows Azure, MVC) is available to hire

Valeria Kokina Posted by: Valeria Kokina in Subscriptions | Comment (1)
Tagged in: seek job , mvc , job seekers , azure , asp net , agile

Senior Microsoft .Net developer (Windows Azure, MVC) is available.

Hire this developer at outsourcing prices and manage him remotely like your in-house staff with Ainstainer Group.

-          Strong programming skills in Microsoft .NET

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Sep 22

ScrumMaster Role and Capacity

Emil Schnabel Posted by: Emil Schnabel in Subscriptions | Comment (0)
Tagged in: ScrumMaster , scrum , role , methodology , capacity , agile

ScrumMaster Role and Activities

Introduction

I have been contemplating the role and capacity of the ScrumMaster for some time now and wanted to pen something down, as I believe this understanding is needed now in the Agile community.

It seems that there are a lot of confusion and misconceptions on the activities and capacity of this specific and important Scrum role in the industry. This article will try to alleviate some of these concerns.

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Aug 31

Get your customers on Board - Continuous feedback with demos

Papapetrou Patroklos Posted by: Papapetrou Patroklos in Subscriptions | Comment (0)
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Introduction
Most of us,during the development of a software system, have probably received some major changes requests from customers near the end of the project. Even worse, during a demo session, the end users as soon as see (for the first time) the final(?) product jump out of the window screaming and cursing you and your team:”This is not what I wanted. I don’t like it. Get it back and bring me something else”. What exactly is this “something else”? No one is able to explain it and at this point of the project being under budget/time pressures it is something extremely difficult to clarify. With a simple (greek) word: A CATASTROPHE. If you find your self smiling at this moment then at some time in the past you have been in such a position and of course, for that we usually blame this unsatisfied and indecisive creature that we call “the customer”. No matter how many times you have tried to “freeze” the requirements in the early stages of the project either because you had a fixed-price contract, or because “we need to know in advance what we are going to develop”, the only thing you achieve is to “lose” the customer from the beginning of the project and obviously, this is not what you would expect. So, are we really unprotected against to our customers? Of course not. Our purpose is, or at least should be, the delivery of a system that covers as many as possible, and always within budget, customer business needs. One of the agile practices I like and I believe that help towards this aim is the one i simply present (for agile dummies) in this blog.

Some simple rules and guidelines

Frequent demos for immediate feedback are extremely imporant and come to fill the gap between the development team (what is implemented) and end users (what they really want from the system).The fact that from the early stages of the project, the customer  participate at regular intervals in such meetings, ensure that critical requirement changes and misunderstandings are identified as soon as possible. Thus the implementation cost is far lower than the scenario where the same change is “discovered” much later when the project would be in advance.As for each agile practice, however, frequent demos should follow some rules and guidelines in order to get the maximum of the. The following brief instructions are  mainly focusing to projects where there is a single customer.

  • Since the beginning of the project, therefore, describe in details the practice you intend to follow and try to explain its return of investment. Make clear that these demos have a single purpose. To understand early in the project what are the actual needs of end users and get as soon as possible feedback on the track you follow, so if something is extremely wrong you have adequate time to fix it.
  • If there is some kind of dissatisfaction about the large number of releases, it is good to clarify that these are not real releases, but internal demos, which will be not available to all users. There are nevertheless valuable for the early diagnosis of requirements misunderstandings.
  • Respect customers’ free time. Try to find an approach that will make everyone happy. If the customer can not attend a demo at the end of each iteration (for example every two or three weeks) try to make it at the end of each month. This, IMHO, is the maximum allowed period between two demos.
  • Try to ensure that you really have to show something. New features, modified or redesigned screens are essential in a demo and should work with no problems. If the customer is frustrated by a non-working demo, then it is most likely that he loses confidence in the development team and distrusts any attempt for future meetings.
  • The demo should be done only by development-team members so that he/she will show the customer features that need his/her attention and feedback. Do not let the customer “play” with the release. Politely remind him the purpose of this meeting and that the demo version of the system is not suitable yet for beta testing.
  • Remember to make clear before each demo that the product/system is still under development and that this is NOT what the end users will get. Try to focus on core and critical business requirements so you can get important feedback, but this does not mean that you ignore proposals for the usability, the user interface, etc.

Product vs Project

What happens though, when we do not have a single customer, but our product is targeting thousands of customers? Obviously, the frequent demo aproach seems to be unrealistic or it may be applied to a limited extent. For that reason, I propose below a couple of alternative actions that will replace this practice aiming at the same results (get early feedback).
  • Try to create videos that demonstrate the new feature of the upcoming release- several days before its official announcement. Something like a pre-release announcement.The main advantage of this approach is that with minimum cost, we can briefly show (the duration of the video should not exceed 2-3 minutes), the core features for that we would like to get feedback and comments from our customers, before the new version is actually released
  • Try to provide a try-it-live demo site where customers (existing and potential) are allowed to test the new upcoming version (Beta versions, Release Candidate versions) and send with a predefined way comments and feedback.
  • Try to gather some of the customers (if they are located in some or nearby places) or a webinar for long distance-customers and perform a demo session instead. Although this will not have the same results as if you would showing the product in a single customer, but you may get some important feedback.
Benefits
Some of the practice’s benefits are summarized right below:
  • Early detection of misunderstood requirements.
  • Correction of the project “path” at a very low cost.
  • Continuous communication with the customer.
  • Increase confidence between the development team and end users.
  • Creative collaboration to achieve the same purpose (meaningful and working product)
  • Most critical and core features are delivered first and complete without having to reach at the latest phases of the project.
Probably the above list is not completed, so if you have some more ideas (remember this post is for agile beginners and not experienced users) feel free to post your comments.
Aug 29

What criteria do you use when choosing Agile Tool? [I need your answer]

Valeria Kokina Posted by: Valeria Kokina in Subscriptions | Comment (0)
Tagged in: tools , agile tools

 

Hi! I coudn't find the right place to ask this question, but I deadly need your help.

I would like to write reviews of several Agile tools that will help people to choose the best one tool according to their needs. 

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