The Retrospective meeting is one of the most important elements of the empirical process as Scrum and Kanban and yet many teams after a while start to skip them. Some of the reasons are that they become very predictive and boredom. Scrum masters who truly understand that this is the time for the team to look back and spend few…
Let’s look at an average day in the life of an Agile team member. For many of us the day may start with a team standup meeting. The daily standup is the moment when we update each other about the progress and align on what is the next important thing that we need to complete today to make sure team…
One of the techniques that Agile teams use for estimating their release or sprint backlog is Planning Poker. The game is very simple, but also a very nice instrument for provoking discussions and enhancing the quality of the planning meeting. For those of you who are not familiar with it, here is an explanation of some key concepts, along with a brief…
In one of the latest updates of the Scrum Guide, the five values of Scrum – commitment, focus, openness, respect, and courage were officially added to the guide. Values are something that I consider very important as they define behaviors in the team, but they are also something that I find very hard to explain to people who are new…
Scrum is a great way to manage a project when the team is fully focused on that single product. Many teams, however, are very often stretched between delivering a new product or a new release of a product, and maintenance activities for older releases and existing customers. Since Scrum prescribes at least a dose of predictability and planning for the…
In recent years, being “agile” is nearly a standard in the IT industry. More and more companies transform their work processes and bring agile methodologies like Scrum, to meet the need for rapid adaptation to the dynamically changing business environment and to more effectively exploit the potential of their employees. An essential part of this transformation is the definition of roles and…
About a month ago I was speaking at DevExperience in Iasi, Romania, and I had the absolute pleasure to meet Georgiana Ghiciuc – an inspiring and charismatic lady, the founder of Beaglecat, and her team. We had a nice conversation around the impact of Lean and Agile on the IT sector and business in general. With Beaglecat’s kind permission, I am…
We are excited to partner with the Software University (http://softuni.bg) in offering the Agile Software Development training. Targeted at young IT professionals, it will offer a solid foundation for using Agile methods in a working environment. Read more about it and register at https://softuni.bg/trainings/1351/agile-software-development-may-2016.
One of the fundamental paradigms in Agile is around self-organizing teams. It is a concept that creates both enthusiasm and frustration in leaders and employees, and the reason is that people usually have very different mental images of what a self-organizing team actually is. In this blog post, I want to comment on a few statements that I sometimes hear…
There is a lot of talking about Agile especially in the IT industry, and I hear many people saying: it’s the currently fashionable way to approach software development and it will eventually pass. Let me share some of my thoughts on why I don’t think Agile is just a hype. The evolving concept of Agile First of all, let’s look…