Bill of Rights for the Scrum Roles
One of the things I admired about Extreme Programming (XP) was the simplicity of the roles defined in the Green Book. In XP, there are only two roles: Customer and Programmer. When you are using XP, the Customer makes business decisions, Programmers make technical decisions and one role may not substitute...
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Scrum Roles Defined
I do a lot of work with Scrum Teams and the ones that struggle the most are the ones where the Scrum roles are defined poorly and\or not filled properly. Scrum is a balanced framework and when the roles get muddled, the framework begins to adopt the dysfunctions of the...
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How to Use a Sprint Burndown Chart
A Sprint Burndown chart is a simple tool used by the Team to provide a measurement on how close they are to meeting the Sprint Goal by the end of the Sprint. Burndown charts are common in Scrum and are simply the trend of work remaining across time in a Sprint, a...
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Definition of Done in Scrum
I was looking back at some old notes of mine from China and I came across a number of questions from the people I worked with about the Definition of Done. The Definition of Done (DoD) is a very important concept in Scrum and not spending time to construct a...
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What to Do if a Scrum Team Finishes a Sprint Early
I had an interesting conversation today with one of the software testers in China who was having difficulty understanding some planning concepts in Scrum. She wanted to know if a Scrum team finished all their work early in a Sprint, would it be OK for the Team to take some...
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What Is Agile in 30 Seconds . . .
If I had to summarize what I think Agile is about right now, this is how I would describe it. Get work done. Meet your commitments. Communicate often. Produce deliverables you are proud of. Go home tired.