Agile development practice consisting of having a short cycle known as a sprint to build functionality. Product owners prioritize a list of work items known as a backlog that the team selects which items to commit to finishing during a sprint. Daily stand-up meetings called scrums are held and ...
53
votes
15answers
4k views
Effective Ways to Introduce Agile into the Workplace?
In your experience (anecdotal or otherwise), what are some effective ways to introduce Agile into a non-Agile organization or company?
UPDATED: Can anyone speak to cases where you tried to introduce ...
51
votes
16answers
3k views
Does Scrum turn active developers into passive developers?
I'm a web developer working in a team of three developers and one designer. It's now about five months that we've implemented the agile scrum software development methodology. But I have a weird ...
51
votes
13answers
3k views
How can we reduce downtime at the end of an iteration?
Where I work we practice scrum-driven agile with 3-week iterations. Yes, it'd be nice if the iterations were shorter, but changing that isn't an option at the moment.
At the end of the iteration, I ...
40
votes
13answers
5k views
Why do we use story points instead of man days when estimating user stories?
In agile methodologies (e.g. SCRUM), the complexity/effort needed for a user stories are measured in Story points, and story points are used to calculate how many user story a team can take in an ...
35
votes
10answers
1k views
How can we make agile enjoyable for developers that like to personally, independently own large chunks from start to finish
We’re roughly midway through our transition from waterfall to agile using scrum; we’ve changed from large teams in technology/discipline silos to smaller cross-functional teams.
As expected, the ...
33
votes
10answers
3k views
Can Agile/Scrum be used by 1 or 2 developers?
Everything I've been reading and researching up to this point describes how Agile/Scrum works great with teams of about 4 to 6 members, maybe even more.
In my current shop, we have about 8 developers ...
30
votes
9answers
2k views
Is unit testing or test-driven development worthwhile?
My team at work is moving to Scrum and other teams are starting to do test-driven development using unit tests and user acceptance tests. I like the UATs, but I'm not sold on unit testing for ...
29
votes
17answers
3k views
Daily standups- yea or nay? [closed]
How valuable (or not) do you think daily stand-up meetings are?
If you're not familiar with it, this refers to a daily meeting that is part of Scrum adherents (and some other agile methodologies). ...
27
votes
7answers
1k views
Should Agile teams deliver new features daily?
My company is in the midst of a transition from waterfall-style development to Agile/Scrum. Among other things, we're told that the expectation is for us to have new working, testable (by QA) ...
26
votes
11answers
2k views
Why and for what reasons developers may not like “daily scrum”?
There are advantages in holding daily scrum, like:
Team get coordinated with each other
Everyone knows what amount of task has been done
Burndown chart gets more and more complete
Task board is ...
25
votes
17answers
4k views
How do you handle regular latecomers at the stand-up meetings? [closed]
We have our daily stand-up meeting at 8:45 while the workday starts at 8:30.
Even with the 15 minutes slack people keep coming too late, on a regular basis. This results in our meetings being small, ...
23
votes
14answers
2k views
Does SCRUM usually involve massive overtime?
I would like to know if overtime is normal for sprints, or if it is an abuse of this methodology. I feel naive and spineless doing all-nighters if I don't have to.
Question is SCRUM specific. ...
22
votes
9answers
1k views
Dominant team members in a Scrum team
What would you do in a situation where a team member tries to take responsibilities are not initially assigned to him but to the Scrum Master?
22
votes
14answers
1k views
What tools do you use to manage requests from users? [closed]
I'm drowning in user emails and I'd like to implement a better way to manage all these requests I get and put them in a queue where those people on a team, as well as users, have access to them and ...
21
votes
12answers
2k views
I just started a job with Scrum and something seems to be missing. I am new to Scrum
The code is a complete mess of a combination of classic ASP/ASP.NET. The scrum consist of us patching up the big mess or making additions to it. We are all too busy doing that to start a rewrite so I ...
21
votes
11answers
2k views
Scrum for a single programmer?
I'm billed as the "Windows Expert" in my very small company, which consists of myself, a mechanical engineer working in a sales and training role, and the company's president, working in a design, ...
20
votes
6answers
1k views
How is Agile different from XP?
I read few articles on web to find out how Agile, XP, Scrum, pair programming are different from each other / related to each other and I derived the following line:
Scrum and XP are almost same. XP ...
18
votes
8answers
1k views
What have you seen go wrong when introducing SCRUM?
What was the single point of failure encountered when your company decided to replace the current processes with SCRUM?
Can you give me some examples of things that have gone really wrong when a ...
18
votes
3answers
630 views
Are there any surveys regarding Scrum efficiency?
Years passed since Scrum had been widely adopted in software world. I’m wondering if there is any efficiency survey done by more or less independent people/institutes. Obviously scrums gurus who ...
17
votes
8answers
1k views
Does a mature agile team requires any management?
After a recent heated debate over Scrum, I realized my problem is that I think of management as a quite unnecessary and redundant activity in a fully agile team. I believe a mature Agile team does not ...
17
votes
10answers
2k views
How does a Scrum team account for infrastructure tasks in the planning meeting?
How does a Scrum team account for dev/infrastructure tasks in the planning meeting?
At first glance, they do not seem like user stories since they do not deliver end user value.
However, attaching ...
16
votes
12answers
754 views
What makes Agile software development so appealing?
Agile software development is becoming a pretty fun buzzword these days.
As a developer, I understand the pragmatic value of iterative development, but (most often) it isn't a developers choice to ...
16
votes
7answers
1k views
Story points for bug fixing tasks: Is it suitable for Scrum?
I'm just wondering if we should assign story points to bug fixing tasks or not. JIRA, our issues-tracking software, does not have story point field for Bug type issues (it's only for Storys and ...
16
votes
5answers
757 views
How do you keep track of a requirements document on an agile team?
I understand that User Stories dominate the agile world, but how are these artifacts stored, so that new developers who join the team can come up to speed with the requirements?
What if the User ...
16
votes
5answers
1k views
How to adopt agile methodology for developing firmware/embedded-systems-software?
I've always wondered how to apply agile methods really are in large complex embedded system software (100+ engineers). Firmware development has some unique characteristics that make it difficult to ...
15
votes
6answers
994 views
Can fixed scope + fixed deadline + fixed price contract ever be made to work with “agile”?
Some projects we run internally using scrum, whilst still being "fixed everything" to the customer. Mixed success on our part (the customer likes the visibility of the burndown chart).
Any ...
15
votes
9answers
671 views
How can architects work with self-organizing Scrum teams?
An organization with a number of agile Scrum teams also has a small group of people appointed as "enterprise architects". The EA group acts as control and gatekeeper for quality and adherence to ...
15
votes
9answers
989 views
Advantages of Scrum for the developers themselves?
Scrum being a project management methodology, how would you 'sell' it to the developers in a team that is reasonably happy with its current situation?
It seems easy to me to explain to our Product ...
14
votes
11answers
1k views
Can daily reports decrease a developer's productivity?
In another question, I asked about why developers might don't like daily scrum. We talked to developers and we decided to not hold daily scrum for a while (to give it a try and customized scrum in our ...
14
votes
10answers
1k views
Skeptic in a Scrum Team
My company has recently switched to an Agile way of working and as a part of it we've started using SCRUM. While I'm very comfortable with it and feel that this way is superior to a traditional one, ...
