Its called the Sprint Review for a Reason In my previous post about the Sprint Planning Meeting: The Sprint Review: The Product Owners Meeting I went through in depth regarding this Scrum ceremony. The important thing regarding this meeting is that it is a Sprint Review, not just a demo. I have heard many teams rename it […]
Ask Questions, Don’t Solve Problem
This article is more aimed at Scrum Masters, but I think there are key take aways that can be applied to any leadership role. Facilitator first Remember as a scrum master you are a facilitator first. You are not there to solve problems for the team. You might know all the answers, but you can’t […]
Give the Dev Team a Week
Fitting Scrum Sprints into a Year Sprints in Scrum are often two weeks, its a nice period. Working in a business, we all know that executives like to set goals and measure performance per quarter. During roadmap or project planning, you might get asked how many sprints have we completed in a quarter? This obviously […]
Should a Product Owner Attend Retrospectives?
The short answer is YES. The Product Owner is part of the Team The Product Owner is part of the team, and should be involved in any discussions about improving things. A scrum team will never reach its maximum potential if only the developers discuss areas to improve. The first question I would ask is […]
Blockers Don’t Exist in Agile
But not in the way you are thinking. Terminology is very important, not just in our professional capacity, but also in life. Words have connotations, especially something so drastic as a ‘Blocker’. Think about it though, does everything on a project stop when someone mentions a ‘blocker’? Not really, what happens is that progress slows […]
Late For The For the Daily Stand Up? You’ll Be Sorry!
What happens if you are for the Scrum Daily Stand Up? The daily stand up is a very important meeting. It sets the tone for the day and ensures that everyone is in line. Have you noticed that people have started to turn up late? Are people starting to get lazy or too comfortable? Incentivise […]
Daily Scrum, do I have to?
The Daily Scrum This will be the first in a series of ‘mini-blog’ posts, small bite sized content with hopefully small nuggets of knowledge, inspiration or motivation. Its a question that gets asked a lot… “Do we have to do it today?”, “Can we skip today?”, “Why is it everyday?”, especially for teams new to […]
User Stories: One Story To Rule Them All
One User Story, Multiple Roles When creating user stories, you might find on occasion they can become quite complicated, especially when you are dealing with multiple cases; for example back office admins, customer functionality, different clients. Lets take a very basic example “As a premium customer, I want to be able to access the online […]
Product Tech Terms: Mob Programming
What is Mob Programming Mob programming, as mobprgramming.org states: “All the brilliant people working on the same thing, at the same time, in the same place and at the same computer” And as the name suggests, Mob Programming is an approach in software development where the whole team works on the same thing. This is […]
Team Onboarding Tip: Welcoming New Members with Notes
Onboarding Team Members This is something I have thought about a lot when new people join my team. I think its important for new team members to get the best on-boarding experience as possible. They should be made to feel as part of the team as quickly as possible and felt welcomed and needed. After […]
