Scrum Plus

Mark Edmead

Yasser Online

Scrum by definition and design is meant to provide an alternative project management framework to traditional waterfall method. As one of the most used Agile methods, scrum is non prescriptive and focusing on fostering team collaborative effort to achieve short term objectives following a relentless steady rhythmic work style.

Sprint after sprint team keeps shoving User Stories from the backlog to the development mill rotated by the collective effort of the team.

However, in the rush to finish the current tasks, quality can be easily overlooked and irreversible technical dept may accumulate unless consistently and actively monitored and controlled using a defined process as I suggest here.

Again, four and three, four meetings types and three artifacts are the only rituals and work-products the Scrum Guide offers!

In practice, it is necessary to build on the framework offered by Scrum in order to avoid low quality deliverables that may occur by the…

View original post 383 more words

SCRUM Agile Methodology

Mark Edmead

Proud Geek

Introduction to SCRUM

Scrum is an agile way to manage a project, usually software development. Agile software development with Scrum is often perceived as a methodology; but rather than viewing Scrum as methodology, think of it as a framework for managing a process.

Common failures which SCRUM cures:

  • Chaos due to changing requirements – the real or perceived requirements of a project usually change drastically from the time the product is designed to when it is released. Under most product development methods, all design is done at the beginning of the project, and then no changes are allowed for or made when the requirements change.
  • Unrealistic estimates of time, cost, and quality of the product – the project management and the developers tend to underestimate how much time and resources a project will take, and how much functionality can be produced within those constraints. In actuality, this usually cannot be…

View original post 1,303 more words

Agile Projects Requirement Management – 12 Checkpoints Approach

Mark Edmead

Agile Gnostic

One of the inherent characteristics of the Agile Software Development is to welcome changing requirements and accept the fact that project’s requirements will evolve as development progress. Unlike the waterfall model, having complete, stable and well-documented requirements are not the pre-requisites to start the Agile project development. Therefore, it’s needed to effectively address the changing or evolving requirements during the software development life-cycle. With the below mentioned requirement management approach, we want to establish best practices for the following categories of requirements:

  1. Known Requirements: Stated known features, functionalities and non-requirements that were identified during the product envisioning stage.
  2. Evolving Requirements: An evolutionary software development approach in which product features and functions are inherently evolutionary in nature and requirements grow based on market conditions, product demand, evolution to users’ needs, product feature aging etc.
  3. Changed Requirements: Product features and functions that were based on assumptions, poorly defined, ignored or…

View original post 2,320 more words

Velocity – Understanding Your Points

Mark Edmead

Taarradhin

VelocityI started this project to help me find the right data points to assist not only with better iteration planning but also to help me plan future iterations with a solid estimate of what we typically complete. I started off by looking at our Velocity, typically the number you use but not something we find as a good predictor of success. To figure out why, I separated out, by iteration, our planned points, our actual points and the average of the actuals.

As you can see by the chart to the left, that gave a pretty clear picture of what we’ve done so far this year; we average 46 actual points per iteration but average 53 planned points. That’s basically a weeks’ worth of work that we’re off by. In doing this, I was curious to see how many points are actually being completed in the week after the iteration…

View original post 232 more words

I’m Presenting on DevOps and ITIL – SoTEC – Oct 24th

Mark Edmead

Optimalconnections's Blog

I am delighted to have been selected to speak on behalf of itSMF USAat the Southern California Technology Conference (SoTEC) on “The Intersection of DevOps and ITIL”.

The presentation is scheduled for Sat, Oct 24th, 2:15-3:15 pm, and will look at what exactly is DevOps, how it relates to ITIL, and how a DevOps approach adds value to an ITIL implementation, and a service management practice in general.

For more info and to register, go to: https://lnkd.in/b-YeDzP

View original post