Scrum Bestiary – The Pig

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008

Rounding out the Scrum Bestiary with its original two protagonists... the chicken and now the pig. Both the pig and the chicken come from Jeff Sutherland's original sketch about who does what in a Scrum daily standup meeting. Pigs are the heart of Scrum. They're the ones who actually do all ...

Managing Bugs with Scrum

Thursday, October 2nd, 2008

So building on my post from earlier this week - Scrum and Supporting Your Existing Products -and reflecting on an interesting thread I've been following here at Microsoft. I thought I'd write a bit about how to handle bugs on your current product development. "We're doing Scrum but we have a ...

Scrum and Supporting Your Existing Products

Monday, September 29th, 2008

Bugs! How do you handle fixing bugs and enhancement requests on an existing release of your product while your team(s) are working on the next release? Typically as you start work on a new version of your product there will be bugs or enhancement requests coming in from users of ...

Visual Studio Team System and Scrum Task Boards

Friday, September 19th, 2008

Teams at patterns & practices use Visual Studio Team System to run their projects. Here are a couple of approaches for getting a traditional Scrum or XP task board experience with Team System; creating paper task cards from Team System using Word's mail merge feature and the Conchango Scrum for ...

Agile 2008 – Conway’s Law and Distributed Teams

Friday, August 29th, 2008

During the distributed agile workshop at Agile 2008 there was some discussion of Conway's Law (named after Melvin Conway). Conway's law basically says Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it. So distributing your team not only effects its communication dynamics adds dysfunction, it also may impact the actual ...