Scrum Teams versus Working Groups
In the past few weeks, I have been putting renewed effort to wrap up the course design for a new course entirely focused on ScrumMaster practice. During a review with a colleague, we identified one key concept we overlooked - how we define a Team. That reminded me of the...
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User Story Examples: Getting the Requirements Right
For Agile teams, the biggest area of friction for agile teams is agreement on what constitutes a story. Product managers and product owners try to write market requirements in the form of a story when many developers really want product specifications.It seems so simple. Product managers and product owner write...
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User stories vs user goals
The problem: Agile developers want user stories; product managers want to bring back stories from the market about users. What we REALLY need is to understand user goals. Is there a difference? Let’s see. User stories are one of the most misunderstood and misapplied artifacts of Agile development. As often happens...
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Scrum Teams Working from Home
Today, I read that new CEO of Yahoo!, Marissa Mayer, has decided to curtail the number of employees who work remotely beginning in June. You can read the story here and some interesting commentary from NPR's blog, All Tech Considered. I excerpted this part from the memo which I think...
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The Many Hats of a ScrumMaster
I have been working with a colleague to develop a new course for ScrumMasters (and other Agile change agents) and we were talking about possible objectives for this course, who would attend and what is missing from our current offerings that this class could provide. As we discussed these ideas...
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Writing Good User Stories
User stories are tool that originated from Extreme Programming and have become the de facto way Agile teams document and collect their requirements. There is a lot written on user stories (link, link, link), so I am just going to talk about what I consider important in writing good stories since I...
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