In The 2020 Scrum Guide a new concept - Product Goal - was introduced. The Product Goal describes a future state of the product which can serve as a target for the Scrum Team to plan against. It basically serves as a long-term objective for a Scrum Team to achieve.
The is a change in The 2020 Scrum Guide that I really like. It's the one related to a definition of a Scrum Team.
In November 2020 a new version of the Scrum Guide was published. The summary of changes can be found here and in a series of next few posts I will try to share my thought on some of these changes. However, there is one change that is not listed there and that, in my opinion, is quite significant. Potentially shippable increment is gone Have you noticed that there is no reference to a...
In a perfect world, a Scrum team should be allowed to execute their sprint without being interrupted, and all changes or new requirements should be addressed at dedicated Scrum events. While Scrum teams should aim for a world of no sprint interruptions, it's not the reality most teams face on daily basis. Customer usually do request new functionalities, users do discover critical defects, etc...
Most (if not all) Scrum teams have a more or less formal Definition of Done (DoD) that dictates when a given user story can be considered as completed (done) and ready for shipment. At the same time, only a few Agile teams have a Definition of Ready (DoR) which, if used smartly, can also give the team a lot of benefits and prevent them from wasting their precious time.
At some point in time, many Agile teams struggle with how to handle bugs and/or maintenance tasks they are faced with. And the core of this problem is whether bugs should be estimated or not. As always, each approach has its pros and cons, but based on my experience I reckon that estimating bugs is not worth the hassle. Let me explain why.
Agile is probably the best approach when it comes to developing complex IT solutions. It’s widely used in product development, but unfortunately, it’s still not that straightforward when you’re working for external clients. The problem is that in far too many situations it’s the corporate purchasing department that awards the seller with a contract, and fixed-scope, fixed...
Having a potentially shippable product every sprint lies in a heart of Agile, but in many organisations – especially the ones that don’t work in SaaS model – a product is not released to the market every sprint. Sometimes frequent delivery is not possible (i.e. in case some additional tasks like a translation of a documentation, legal approval, etc. have to be done at the end of the...
Many teams transitioning to Agile struggle with delivering a potentially shippable product every sprint. Producing a piece of software that provides a business value to a client every 2 weeks seems impossible. Usually, teams say that they can deliver either front-end, or backend, or architecture design for a given feature, but not all these together.
Managing complex and lengthy projects is a challenge. When dozens of people are working on the same product in parallel there has to be a mechanism for identifying and resolving dependencies and cross-team blockers.