Scrum

Printing Physical Scrum Board From Atlassian Jira

It’s well known fact that physical Scrum Boards provide many benefits over their electronic counterpart.

With physical boards current sprint state is transparently visible to anybody in the team and to the stakeholders. As a team member you no longer are required to explain someone what exactly the team is focusing on right now as anyone can look at physical board at any point of time. Also, during standup, story-card and sprint progress get more attention than individual progress. You can setup your physical board the way you want and you don’t have to work around the limitation of any electronic tool.

Appraisals in an Agile Company – Part 1

by Avienaash Shiralige 4 Comments

Appraisals! How many of you dread this word? This is the only time in the year that you get to bargain for salary increments, everyone end-up negotiating to their best. Appraisals are closely connected with salary raise/increments, bonus payouts and it’s feedback intent takes the backseat.

There are three major issues with traditional approach to appraisal:

Measuring and rewarding individual behaviors and contributions OVER team based measurements.
Long appraisal cycle(mostly once a year) discussing both salary increments and feedback.
Feedback process – Filling long appraisals forms with least discussions between reviewers about reviewee.

Agile Contracting: Discovery, Fixed Budget, Variable Scope

by Avienaash Shiralige Leave a Comment

We discussed about committing fixed number of story points and swapping any additional scope with existing backlog in our previous post “Agile for Fixed Bid Projects“. This is a great way to maximize value with minimal change in timelines and budget. This works well when there is a trust existing between product and engineering, and client/product team understands this agile approach. Still, fixing size, undermines one major aspect of an agile team – “applying learning back into the project”. Development teams while doing size estimation give higher points where there are uncertainties and risks. Known unknowns, new technology, unclear requirements etc. are few reasons for providing higher story points. As project progresses, teams get more knowledgeable (both technology and business) and hence some tasks now look smaller than before.

Agile Thinking: Continuous Improvement – ScrumMaster 1.0 to 2.0

by Avienaash Shiralige 7 Comments

Readers, Our “Agile Thinking” series is focussed on bringing agility into our thinking as this helps in moving from Doing-Agile to Being-Agile. You can read our earlier article in this series Agile Thinking: Stop Starting, Start Finishing.

This post talks about continuous improvement and obviously this can be applied everywhere irrespective of it is a process, practice or a role. From my recent experience, I would like to share today, how ScrumMater (SM) role evolved in some of the companies.

In many organizations, ScrumMaster role is defined something similar to what is shown below. For conversation sake let’s call it as SM 1.0 (see pic below)

In service industry projects, SM’s playing the role by book (SM 1.0) and expecting Product Owner(PO) from the client side to write stories, acceptance criteria and prioritization did not work due to some of the reasons stated below.

Agile Thinking : Stop Starting, Start Finishing

by ShriKant Vashishtha 13 Comments

Limiting “Work in Process” (WIP) items is one of key ideas of Kanban. A natural outcome of it, inherently coming from Lean philosophy is to stop starting and start finishing.

By having too many work in process items, it looks like everybody is busy but there is no functional outcome for the end user. So, instead, it’s important to work towards completing the user-story.

From the outset it looks like, “Stop starting, start finishing” philosophy is limited to Lean and Kanban world. Scrum world is either doing it well or doesn’t need it. Right?

Wrong!!!

Let’s take a look at a typical Scrum standup.