Organizing & Planning Work

The Daily Scrum serves to create transparency over the progress towards the Sprint Goal and provides the development team an opportunity to inspect and adapt.

Daily Scrums help Developments teams to self-organize and better their chances towards achieving the sprint goal. A Scrum Master or the team's leader facilitates these daily events making sure the meeting is a success and the team is aligned on their plan for the next 24hours. However, how does a Daily Scrum differ from a Daily Standup, what's its main purpose, and how should it be done? Sjoerd Nijland explains these questions and details much more about the Daily Scrum in this article.

A look at 6 different types of Scrum Masters and how shared or dedicated they are with their teams.

The role of the Scrum Master can vary greatly depending on the context and the needs of the team. Consequently, there are various SM variations which adapt to specific situations. Andreea Gheorghiu shares her views on the pros and cons of each variation, and makes recommendations. Having someone look over the processes of a team and help it evolve is necessary, but it is equally necessary to maximize each SM's chance of success.

Understanding the ramifications of the decisions we make with respect to what is fixed, what is firm, and what is flexible about scope, schedule and resources.

When we work on projects with fixed dates, scopes, and resources, we run the risk of burning out our teams and compromising quality. Use the tradeoff matrix to agree with your stakeholders as to what you’ll do when things - almost inevitably - don’t go exactly as planned.

By putting these assumptions in place, discussions about prioritization become more focused on the work and how to make the best use of our scares capacity.

An Agile coach reflects, formulates and then re-iterates three basic assumptions as to why agile teams prioritize as they do: 1) People give it their best in every project; 2) there is always more work to do than people have the capacity to do; and 3) people do not initially know what works best unless they try. They are not new or novel but Marcus Hammarberg has found that re-iterating them before starting discussions about prioritization makes the conversation more focused on the work and how to make the best use of our scarce capacity.

Story point represent the effort involved to deliver a product backlog item.

Story points are about time, since they exist in order to predict how much functionality can be delivered by what date. Time is what our bosses, clients and customers care about. In this article Mike Cohn examines how risk, uncertainty and complexity are factors that may influence the effort involved.

Invoking the immutability rule to disallow the gradual introduction of Scrum is nonsensical.

Several Scrum practitioners claim that there’s only one approach for introducing Scrum. They say you have to start by explaining Scrum thoroughly, and then the team has to start doing everything that’s part of the framework. But, rolling out Scrum and practicing it by the letter does not mean you're doing it. In fact, the author argues this only makes it harder for people to practice Scrum.

He invokes the idea that adopting Scrum gradually limits you from the Scrum benefits noting that the Scrum guide does not completely rule out the gradual implementation of Scrum and he believes it is easier to learn and understand the benefits of the different parts of Scrum.

The mechanics of a Sprint, and how team members collaborate to produce an increment.

As the title indicates, in this article Ian Mitchell goes step-by-step at the mechanics of a Sprint - starting with the preparation, the first items to be delivered, and the day-to-day work to be done. The play-by-play goes all the way to the retrospective, looking at how team members are expected to collaborate through out the development process.

How fluid scrum teams could assist multiple scrum teams self-organize to manage complexity.