The daily standup meeting is one of the key agile practices. For teams that are beginning their agile transformation, this is an easy ritual to adopt. For mature agile teams, it is an indispensable part of the day. The daily standup usually goes something like this: The team gathers in the team room. Each team … Continue reading Outstanding Standups
Agile
Are You Being Agile or Doing Agile?
The starting point for adopting agile is for a team to learn the mechanics of an approach such as Scrum. They write user stories instead of use cases, do daily standups dutifully, and replace their lessons learned meetings with sprint retrospectives. Eventually the rest of the business comes on board, and the Product Owner takes … Continue reading Are You Being Agile or Doing Agile?
Is the Product Owner a Team Member?
Scrum prescribes three roles: Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Team Members. The Team Members consist of developers, DBAs, QA people, and others who do the coding, testing, and other work to bring software to life. Team Members rely on the Product Owner to provide information about requirements as well as to create and execute acceptance tests. If … Continue reading Is the Product Owner a Team Member?
Purposeful Personas and User Stories
The team was pumped to start work on the new Inventory SAAS product and eagerly anticipated the first user story writing workshop. Bert, the product owner, had been doing a lot of up front work to make sure things got off to a strong start. The team was giddy and the room abuzz. “Okay team, … Continue reading Purposeful Personas and User Stories
Agile Reflections 