Tag: agile development

4 October 2017 / Agile & Scrum

Why and how do we use pull request?

The goal of this blog posts is to share why a team I coached used pull requests and how we did this within the context of a midsize product. I share this experience, knowing it’s not a perfect example, as it might provide inspiration on the advantages and disadvantages of such an approach. The context The context is a customization and extension of an existing...

14 May 2014 / Agile & Scrum

New WisP session: The SAFe release planning game

Our next session to be announced for WisP 2014 is the SAFe release planning game. This interactive workshop, based on a simulation game, is designed to give participants insights in how to do release planning across several teams working on the same product or value stream. The session provides some background about SAFe and the concept or Agile release trains, to understand some patterns of having several...

6 May 2013 / Agile & Scrum

Most common mistakes in scrum ceremonies 7/7: general scrum pitfalls

With great power comes great responsibility You can’t expect a team that is used to working in a command and control environment to suddenly make the switch to becoming a self-organized team without any guidance. All self-organization in nature happens within boundaries. Just like in nature, we will need to set boundaries when we help teams in becoming self-organizing. We need to show them ways...

22 April 2013 / Agile & Scrum

Most common mistakes in scrum ceremonies 5/7: the sprint review

Turning it into a status meeting, focusing on time tracking The goal of a sprint review is to show the product owner and the stakeholders what the team developed during the sprint. It is not about listing what each team member did, how much time he/she spend on that and how they got it done. This is not valuable for the stakeholders and pretty frustrating...

15 April 2013 / Agile & Scrum

Most common mistakes in scrum ceremonies 4/7: the daily standup

Losing focus during the ceremony The bigger your team gets, the harder it will be to make sure that everyone listens to the rest of the team, otherwise the whole idea of sharing knowledge and checking whether you can still meet the sprint goal is thrown out the window. In order to avoid everyone talking at the same time and losing focus during this very...

8 April 2013 / Agile & Scrum

Most common mistakes in scrum ceremonies 3/7: the sprint planning

No acceptance criteria listed on user stories This will keep the team from really committing to the sprint backlog. If they have no clear idea on how to demo a user story, how the product owner will decide whether or not a story is really done, the team will have no way to feel confident about the commitment they are making. This will frustrate the...