Within the umbrella of agile practices, people enquire about the scrum methodology and the kanban technique as regards their similarities, their differences and potential benefits using one over the other. This blog looks at the characteristics of each, potential scenarios where one or both could be used to best advantage and finishes with a video of Jean Tabaka providing her perspective on both methodologies.

In my own experience and from reading various blogs, questions on the compatibility and possible conflicts between user centred design and agile principles get raised. As an advocate of both sets of principles, I think they are compatible and can influence the likely success of a project. In this blog I set my responses to some of the questions raised.

One of the principles of the Scrum approach to agile development and project management is self-organisation. The benefit(s) that occur when a team self-organises include improved performance and creativity within the team. I have decided in this blog to use two video clips which discuss the principles of self-organisation, how to roll it out in an organisation and some differences with traditional project management.

Technical debt is a metaphor that refers to the consequences of allowing low quality software coding to go unchanged. Ward Cunningham, one of the pioneers of extreme programming, coined the phrase to convey the potential risks of taking short-cuts when developing and testing code for an application. Ward’s first law states that lowering code quality lengthens development time. Whatever the form, the negative impact of technical debt on your development team decreases their throughput. get out of this spiral, strong executive sponsorship is needed.

The scrum process provides for planning at different phases of a project to enable the delivery team and product owner, facilitated by the scrummaster to define product features with user stories and related definition(s) of ‘done’ for each sprint. With this in hand, the delivery team can achieve momentum to deliver working software with no interference.
There is no one solution to rolling out scrum in an organisation. This is understandable as each organisation has its own unique characteristics and challenges. As scrum seeks to complete a project over a series of sprints; organisations can borrow these principles to implement scrum over a series of iterations.
Win-win all round.

In browsing some scrum related topics recently, I came across an interesting document by Michael James in which he lists characteristics and tasks that scrummasters can leave out in the day to day workings of a sprint. What I like about this checklist is it’s format, where the tasks and characteristics are grouped by interactions between the scrummaster and the product owner, the delivery team and the wider organisation. I have listed some of what I think are the more interesting points in the checklist.

In a previous blog, I wrote about the principles and advantages of agile development and I would like to continue on that theme with a post on the role of a scrum master. A scrummaster’s responsibilities The scrum master is; First and foremost, a facilitator to the project team, to ensure that all ideas/views from [...]

When I was completing my scrum master training with Jean Tabaka, we started the course with an interesting discussion on what we thought Agile development and Scrum was and wasn’t about. This discussion illustrated some valuable points for project teams that in today’s business world, have to be more responsive, flexible and creative when delivering [...]