ScrumMaster

Agile Thinking: Continuous Improvement – ScrumMaster 1.0 to 2.0

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.

100 Practices to Form Your Dream Scrum Team

by Avienaash Shiralige 12 Comments

Today I would like to share few practices that I have seen working wonders to teams following scrum. Not all the practices are followed by all the scrum teams. But by and large you see highly successful teams has many of them from this list.

Below is a mind map which you can download to see in it a bigger view or click zoom after you click on the image to see larger view.

I would like to hear from all of you regarding what else you would like to add to this list or modify any of them. Depending upon your feedback I will update this diagram and share updated version of this for everyone to use.

On purpose, I have not included XP practices just to keep focus only on Scrum.

What practices you would like to see or have experienced in your dream scrum team? Please write to me in the comments section.

Scrum Team Dependency on User Experience/Wireframes

by Avienaash Shiralige 7 Comments

Dependency management is a key aspect in Scrum. Dependencies between Scrum team members, between User Stories, between core and extended team, between team and product owner – all have an impact on the efficiency and effectiveness of the team.

I often see Scrum teams having dependencies on User Experience/Web Developers. This is because PO has defined requirements for new sprint, and UI/Web-Developers who are part of development scrum team start working on this now. Wire-frames are yet to be created as per these requirements.