Mitch Lacey's Scrum and Agile Blog

The Daily Scrum, or Daily Standup, is a brief, 15-minute meeting where team members sync up on their progress, plan for the next 24 hours, and highlight any impediments. This promotes transparency, early issue identification, accountability, and open communication, fostering team cohesion.

A Sprint Planning Meeting is a meeting where the Scrum Team decides what they will work on during the upcoming Sprint. Primarily, the Product Owner and the Developers collaborate to define a goal for the Sprint and select the Product Backlog Items that will help achieve this goal. This Sprint Planning template will help ensure your teams success.

An excellent method for prioritization is Relative Weighting, which Karl Weigers introduced in 1999. This method not only provides a mechanism for prioritizing requirements based on user input and feedback but also includes the expert judgment of the team. Like other prioritization techniques, Relative Weighting allows the Product Owner to better gauge which features to implement and in what priority order.

Agile is a vast umbrella that encompasses various frameworks including Scrum, Kanban, Lean, and Extreme Programming (XP), each with its own unique qualities and benefits. These approaches all align with the values and principles of Agile but provide specific processes and tactics to guide teams to the Agile mindset.

The Sprint Backlog is a Scrum artifact, or a tool, at the heart of a Sprint. It is an artifact that when mismanaged or ignored, often leads to Scrum teams to be in a whirlwind of disorganization. What is this artifact that holds such importance? Let’s dive into Sprint Backlog, understanding its core definition, its ownership, and who is responsible for its management.

Agile and Scrum have transformed project management in the tech industry and beyond. With their emphasis on collaboration, iterative development, and adaptability, these approaches have revolutionized how teams work together to deliver high-quality products. For agile practitioners, from Scrum team members to senior leadership, understanding the difference between estimating and committing is pivotal. Let’s explore not just the conceptual differences of the two, but how forecasting work versus committing to work blindly can influence the dynamics of an agile team.

As the sun rises over the digital landscape, Product Owners find themselves at the helm of a dynamic ship—their vessel, the product, charting a course through ever-changing waters. In this voyage, they encounter storms of stakeholder expectations, whirlpools of conflicting priorities, and the siren call of rapid release cycles. Fear not, fellow navigators! Let us unfurl the sails and explore the art of Product Ownership.

Are you good at technical interviewing? If not, you are not alone. Due to the long and incomplete feedback loop for interviewers, many people in the industry are following bad practices without realizing it. However, there is a way to break this cycle and improve your skills.

Having a Product Owner participate at Daily Scrum meetings can be an invaluable tool for ensuring Scrum team accountability. However, there are also some drawbacks associated which must be taken into consideration before deciding whether or not it’s worth it. In this article we will explore how having a Product Owner attend Daily Scrums can provide benefits as well as examine any potential drawbacks associated with their presence.

What’s the easiest way to screw up a Scrum or agile adoption at a company? Simple. Tell people “we’re agile”, give them a one-hour overview of how things work, and then let them loose. This post discussed my first agile project, and the five steps I’ve implemented at multiple companies to ensure a successful Scrum transformation.

The Kano Model of Customer Satisfaction is a questionnaire-based approach and is a powerful way of visualizing product characteristics and stimulating debate between the delivery team and stakeholders.

The fourth question in Scrum is used for helping identify early risks in new teams that may not surface through more traditional approaches.

Which feature will entice customers to purchase your product? Which feature will cause customers to upgrade? Which feature will make customers so happy that they’ll ignore or tolerate the features that they wish you would fix or remove?

Gardeners prune trees to control their growth. Sometimes the pruning is artistic, and we end up with shrubs shaped like animals or interesting abstract shapes. Much of the time the pruning is designed to build a balanced tree that yields high quality fruit. The process isn’t about “cutting” – it is about “shaping.” Use this metaphor to help create the product your customers desire.

One of the most essential Scrum meetings is the daily scrum, also known as the daily standup. It is intended as a quick meeting to synchronize the efforts of the team members to ensure that every team member is aware of how the team as a whole is tracking towards its sprint goal. This post discusses 4 ways you can ensure that your daily scrums are productive.

The job of Scrum Master is real. It can have a big impact on costs saving the company money. But what does a Scrum Master do all day to justify a full-time role? The following list encompasses most, but not all, of the day-to-day tasks.

I recently wrote about 4 secrets to a successfully daily scrum, which covered the basics for ensuring a productive daily scrum meeting. However, what do you do if your team is distributed?

We’ve all heard the common myth, Agile means no documentation. While other agile fallacies exist, this is a big one, and it could not be farther from the truth. Good agile teams are disciplined about their documentation but are also deliberate about how much they do and when.

Sprint Planning does not need to be challenging. It is often fun and a time for the entire Scrum team to build camaraderie by working together to answer the question of “What can we commit to?” Here I provide examples and strategies for keeping Sprint Planning focused and effective, and detail potential solutions to common problems teams encounter when planning a Sprint.