Tips for ScrumMasters: How to act on retrospective outcomes
Posted by Marco Mulder in the late evening: November 25th, 2009
In my previous blog, I talked about when to estimate user stories so that a Product Owner can do release planning based on velocity and relative estimates. This time, I will discuss another topic that I see many Scrum teams struggle with: how to implement improvements based on what is discussed in retrospectives.
Many Scrum teams have a hard time to continuously improve themselves. In retrospectives, problems and possible improvements are discussed. Then nothing happens. In later retrospectives, the same problems are discussed without noticeable changes. Retrospectives like this are a waste of time. Even worse, missing out on the opportunity to continuously improve is a big waste in itself. The velocity of such teams and the quality of their deliverables will almost certainly get better if they find ways to act on improvements that are identified in retrospectives.
(more...)
Tips for ScrumMasters: Estimate user stories outside Sprint Planning Meetings
Posted by Marco Mulder mid-afternoon: November 11th, 2009
One of the biggest strengths of Scrum is that it is a framework instead of a detailed methodology such as RUP. In Scrum, concepts are described that make essential aspects of projects fall into place in a very powerful way. One does not need a Process Engineer to tailor Scrum before it can be applied successfully. However, because there are many things that Scrum does not describe in detail, there is plenty of room left to mess things up 
In a series of blogs, I want to share some best practices that I have found useful for ScumMasters. In this first blog, I discuss on how to facilitate the estimation of Product Backlog items so that the Product Owner can do release planning.
(more...)
Visualizing user stories from idea to production
Posted by Marco Mulder mid-afternoon: October 25th, 2009
In many Scrum projects, user stories that are Done at the end of a sprint have not yet been put into production. In other words, production is often not part of the Definition of Done. There can be several reasons for this. Examples are:
- additional acceptance or integration testing is needed that can not (yet) be done within the sprint;
- user stories have dependencies on hardware of software from an external party that is not yet available;
- minimal marketable features are bigger than what can be produced in one sprint.
Jeff Sutherland @ nlscrum
Posted by Marco Mulder at around evening time: June 29th, 2009
Last week I co-organized an nlscrum event with a very special guest: Jeff Sutherland. After rushing with him from the airport to our Xebia office, Jeff gave a very inspiring presentation.
Estimating a product backlog more effectively
Posted by Marco Mulder in the late evening: February 25th, 2009
Ever since I read Mike Cohn's book Agile Estimating and Planning, it has been a great help in doing Agile projects. One of the ideas that I like very much is to estimate user stories on a product backlog in an abstract measure: story points. Story point estimates only need to be correct relative to each other. Having such estimates allow you to monitor velocity: how many story points can be done in an iteration. Based on velocity and an estimated product backlog, decisions about scope, schedule and budget can be made and continuously refined a very informed way.
The most common way to estimate user stories on a product backlog is by doing a planning poker session. However, in my experience it is pretty hard for a team to do this effectively for a big list of user stories. Therefore I tried out another approach.
(more...)
Using FitNesse with the Maven 2 classpath
Posted by Marco Mulder mid-morning: December 16th, 2008
When working with Maven 2 and FitNesse, it is desirable to use the Maven classpath in FitNesse. The FitNesse Maven plugin can do this for running tests in a build, but not for using FitNesse interactively.
(more...)
Case study: Distributed Scrum Project for Dutch Railways
Posted by Marco Mulder in the early morning: August 18th, 2008
Recently I wrote a blog about the way that we do distributed Agile projects. Martin van Vliet and I have also published an article on InfoQ about one of them. So if you want to know more about one of our bigger distributed Agile projects, here it is: Case study: Distributed Scrum Project for Dutch Railways.
My experiences with distributed Agile software development
Posted by Marco Mulder in the late evening: August 13th, 2008
I have been a Scrum Master on one of our distributed Agile projects for about a year. I would like to tell you about how we do such projects and share some of my experiences. If you are having a bad time with offshore software development, try not to get too jealous because we are having a great time at it
(more...)
JavaPolis 2007
Posted by Marco Mulder around lunchtime: December 15th, 2007
Last three days I have been to JavaPolis 2007 in Antwerp. It was the first time that I went to this conference and I really liked it. Great things about it are it's location and, most of all, it's speakers. The location is a cinema. Slides and demo's are shown on huge screens that are normally used to show blockbusters. The list of speakers included heroes such as James Gosling, Joshua Blog, Bruce Eckel and Scott Ambler.
I will give some of my impressions.
(more...)
Better be Wise than Agile
Posted by Marco Mulder late at night: March 4th, 2007
I think people are getting too religious about following Agile methodologies. Agile principles and best practices are valuable for applying important lessons that have been learned in software development. However, the drawback of following methodologies is that it takes experience and wisdom to know which of their practices work best in a particular situation. Best practices and even principles that are blindly followed may do more harm than good, even if they are Agile.
To illustrate this, consider the following two Agile principles (http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html):
(more...)
Archives
Xebia Sites
Categories
- Java (282)
- Agile (109)
- General (50)
- Testing (42)
- Performance (42)
- Hibernate (36)
- Scrum (33)
- Podcast (31)
- Architecture (31)
- Spring (28)
- SOA (24)
- Maven (22)
- Project Management (22)
- Middleware (23)
- Deployment (14)
- Flex (17)
- JPA (17)
- Eclipse (15)
- Xebia Labs (15)
- Quality Assurance (14)