Daily stand up meetings were introduced to me together with Scrum. From my point of view having a daily stand up meeting is a very good idea for coordinating and planning the day. Since it makes a difference whether your daily stand up meeting is effective or not, I want to share some thoughts on that subject.
Planning Poker is an estimation technique often used in agile software development. All Scrum teams I’ve worked with or met at gatherings know planning poker and use it on their projects. So I assume it is very widely spread. However, often enough I’ve seen that Planning Poker isn’t played the right way. There are certain rules for playing Planning Poker that need to be respected in order to get the full benefit of playing it. Team members reveal their estimation to each other before everyone has made an estimate for themselves. In case Story Points are used, there is often a debate about Story Points interfering the actual estimation and exchange of information in Planning Poker. This is just two of the …
With this post I want to shed some light on my experiences with Sprint Burndown charts. Especially the question of who owns the Sprint Burndown chart and is responsible for drawing it. In case it is not presented on a flip chart, the matter will be about who maintains the status in the used tools. Should it be done by the team that implements the software or should it be done by the person responsible for planning the scope, the product owner. In Scrum, a method of agile software development, should it be possible that the scrum master or agile coach draws the Sprint Burndown chart? Before we narrow down the topic, let’s look at what a Sprint Burndown chart is good for. A Sprint Burndown chart is a chart …
Are your estimates for the duration of tasks not accurate enough? Do you spend more or even less time than you thought you would? This is particularly unpleasant when time is limited. Accurate estimates of task needs practice. The bigger the task the less accurate your estimate usually is. Inaccurate estimates sum up and make it difficult to plan. Completion of larger work items is more difficult to predict due to a sum of inaccurate task estimates. The estimate is therefore not useful for planning. Having experienced this in several teams, I thought of a way to test estimates and improve them. This simple exercise helped to do just this. It can be applied to any task that you are facing. Before starting the task, write down an estimation of how long you think you …
„Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much“ Helen Keller Collaboration is the subject of this post. You will learn about „customer collaboration over contract negotiation“ with considerations for daily use in software development. Collaboration is the keyword. It is hard to imagine software development undertakings that go without contracts. With “customer collaboration over contract negotiation”, all negotiations should happen collaboratively. This means that negotiations are transparent with no hidden agendas. Pricing should be fair for all parties. If a software development undertaking starts with hidden intentions, it will become difficult to work together in a truly agile manner. One of the values of agile software development, trust, is missing from start in this case. This doesn’t mean …
