Tag: scrum ceremony

6 April 2016 / Agile & Scrum
Case Study: Enhancing Team Work Using Dojo’s

The issue: knowledge sharing & alignment It is frequently seen that even though people are working on the same delivery there still is misalignment on the way of working, with what degree of finish (D.O.D. interpretations), etc.  This especially happens with different skills and contexts that imply different perspectives on how to look at software. Either way you place it: knowledge sharing is lacking.  One of the...

23 March 2016 / Agile & Scrum
Surprise Surprise: Benefits of Cross-Functional Teams

Stage Backlog Refinement session.  Purpose  Our Product Owner came up with new stories to be estimated. 14 to be precise.  It required some preparation however.  We have 2 teams, and they do the Backlog Refinement together.  Around 20 people in one room, partly offshore, estimating together is quite a challenge! Meeting Progress The meeting was slowly progressing and at the same time the activity was...

19 February 2016 / Agile & Scrum
Splitting Backlog Items Part 3: How

In a sequence of blog posts based on our “Sharpen your story splitting skills” at XPDays 2015 to frame our useful deck of cards with splitting patterns, we bring you the last blogpost about how to split backlog items.  Background Many times during our session we got questions like: "What’s the best pattern?" "Can you give us advice on how to split?" "When to apply which pattern?"...

10 February 2016 / Agile & Scrum
Splitting Backlog Items Part 2: Who

After XPDays 2015 in our session “Sharpen your story splitting skills”, we concluded that some additional framing was needed for our useful deck of cards with splitting patterns.  This article is the successor of the "Splitting Backlog Items Part 1: When" post, and will handle about the people and aims to help you understand dysfunctions that make item splitting a pain and the reasons for good practices. Background Quite frequently we see...

27 January 2016 / Agile & Scrum
Why Sprint n-1 Analysis is a BAD idea…

(commonly known as the Scrummerfall anti-pattern) Consider the following familiar situation The team has taken a story in the sprint, and during the sprint, shit hits the fan. They rework, rework again several times to get it to done. Then the “we-could-have-avoided-this” feeling enters the minds of the team...  In the Retro the conclusion is clear:   We could have avoided this!! We had to analyse this better!...

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...