Conventional, long-standing advice regarding transitioning to Scrum or any agile process has been to start with a pilot project, learn from it, and then spread agile throughout the organization.
A project management office (PMO) that is engaged in and supportive of transitioning to Scrum can be a tremendous boon or a source of resistance.
High-performing Scrum teams have learned to do a little bit of everything during a sprint, thereby eliminating large handoffs between specialists.
With this in mind, Kenny Rubin, Laurie Williams and I created the Comparative Agility assessment (CA), which is available for free online. Like the Shodan Adherence Survey and Agile:EF, a CA assessment can be based on individual responses to survey questions. However, it was also designed to be completed by an experienced ScrumMaster, coach, or consultant on behalf of a team or company based on interviews or observation.
The concepts of agility and project governance are not fundamentally opposed. Each is an attempt to improve the finished product. Scrum strives to do this through close collaboration and the short inspect-and-adapt cycles of the timeboxed sprints. Project governance strives to do it by what we might call inspect-and-approve (or reject) checkpoints in which the product or project is compared to a set of desirable attributes.
Rolling lookahead planning is a useful technique for large projects or any project with external dependencies. This short article describes how, when, and why to do it.
Not everyone involved in an agile transition wants the change to be successful. This tongue-in-cheek article details twenty things you can do to sabotage an agile transition. Of course, the twenty things also serve as reminders of things to avoid or watch out for. If you'd like to hear this article rather than read it, Ryan Wiancko of IndustryBroadcast has recorded it.
In seeking to improve how we develop software, we continually inspect and adapt. While thinking recently about the characteristics of the ideal team member, we found similarities between the best-performing soft- ware teams of today and the Knights of the Round Table. This article considers the Code of Chivalry as applied to team members.
This article addresses the issue of how much detail should be included in product backlog items and when that detail should be added. In answering that question it provides guidance on how to incorporate activities such as user experience design and architecture into agile projects.
The scrum of scrums meeting is an important technique in scaling Scrum to large project teams. These meetings allow clusters of teams to discuss their work, focusing especially on areas of overlap and integration. Imagine a perfectly balanced project comprising seven teams each with seven team members.