Tag: SCRUM

Scrum Ceremonies

Scrum is intended to be an iterative and incremental approach to improving the software development process. There are 3 key scrum ceremonies designed to help facilitate improvements to your process: The “Daily Stand-up” Sprint Planning Sprint Retrospective We first presented these ideas to a room full of Constant Contact developers who engage in Scrum practices […]

Three Amigos to the Rescue

Note: This is the 3rd installment in the Scrum Hacks series. What is Three Amigos? Three Amigos is a collaboration technique used as part of the scrum process to define: what to do how to determine that it’s been done correctly It requires the collaboration of the three primary perspectives in a development team: Business […]

Scrum Hacks – Team Culture

The underlying theme of this series on Scrum is to provide tips and suggestions to improve the efficiency of your Scrum processes. While many of the suggestions that you’ll see are tangible and  process related, there is a less tangible but equally effective element to Scrum that can definitely improve the overall experience, sprint velocity […]

How to Create Balance in Your Team with the Help of SCRUM and Taylor Swift

I recently found myself at a Taylor Swift concert. Yes, that’s what happens when you have teenage children. But while listening to her song “Shake It Off,” I couldn’t help but be reminded of the importance of making sure that we shake up our product development environment and culture every once in a while. As […]

Our SCRUM Metrics

Here we are, rolling out SCRUM across our teams, having teams practice the process and deliver customer value.  We needed to figure out a simple way to measure the effectiveness of our rollout.  Measuring the effectiveness has two parts: Part 1 How effective were we in changing team behaviors, making our team members and product […]

SCRUM – It’s the Team and Teamwork

As we have continued to rollout SCRUM into our organization I have been reminded how important team behaviors are for the success of SCRUM teams. It seems so simple at 50,000 feet. We employ great engineers; they are all nice people, why won’t this just work?  The reality is something far more difficult to achieve. […]

SCRUM and RACI

As we have been putting SCRUM into the organization, it has me thinking about how to help the teams understand roles and responsibilities in the new SCRUM formation.  We use RACI (defined below) internally to help dictate everyone’s understanding of who makes which decisions and why. One of the best articles on the subjects of […]

Losing the Trees through the Forest

I have written a number of articles for this blog about our adoption of the SAFe framework for scaling Agile. However, it became obvious in late 2014 that we had a fundamental problem. No matter how well we did release planning, epic prioritization, or release trains, it wasn’t getting us where we need to go. […]