Creating Effective Sprint Goals
Working with a sprint goal is a powerful agile practice. This post helps you understand what sprint goals are, why they matter, hand you can write and track them.
Tag Archives: teamwork
Epics and Ready Stories
This post explains how to write user stories at the right level of detail, and how to derive small, ready stories from big, coarse-grained epics.
Choosing the Lean and Agile Innovation Practices
Innovation can be a tricky thing: Not only does it means different things to different people, but creating a brand-new product requires different practices compared to updating a mature one. This post helps you choose the right lean and agile practices to innovate successfully. It introduces three innovation stages and explains how product ownership, process, and project setup are influenced by the amount of uncertainty present.
Agile User Interface Design
The role of design still puzzles many agile teams I work with. When should the design activities take place? Who should carry them out? How are design decisions best captured? This blog tries to answer the questions by discussing a user-centric, iterative, and collaborative design process for Scruma and Kanban teams.
The Highlander Principle
If you grew up as a teenager in the 1980s like me, you are probably familiar with the quote “There can only be one” from the first Highlander movie. Interestingly, this statement is also true for product owners: There should only be one product owner per product. But don’t worry: You don’t have to become an immortal warrior to understand the Highlander principle. Reading this blog post will do the trick.
The Scrum Startup
The blog posts explains how to setting up a Scrum team as an incubator in an established enterprise helps create a new product, and to pilot an agile way of working.
User Story Modelling
User stories are great at capturing product functionality in isolation. But they are not well suited to describe the relationship between different features and capture user journeys and workflows. This blog posts shows how context and activity diagrams can be successfully used to model interactions in user story context.
The Definition of Ready in Scrum
“Ready are you? What know you of ready?” says Yoda to Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars movie “The Empire Strikes Back.” Just as it’s important for Luke to understand what “ready” means, so is it for product owners. Luckily, you don’t have to become a Jedi to find out. Reading this post will do.
The Scrum Product Owner Role on One Page
The product owner is a product management role that emerged in Scrum in the late 1990ies. But many organisations still struggle to effectively apply it. In this article, I offer an overview of the role including its authority and responsibility.
Stable Agile Teams
It’s not uncommon for me to visit a new client and discover that the agile development teams frequently change, sometimes after every single sprint. Changing the team composition too frequently is usually undesirable, though. Teams need stability to flourish and realise their full potential. This post provides practical tips to help you create stable agile teams.