A routine question before starting a project is “Why is this needed?” Such a question might be posed by primary school students who are assigned to create a diorama about the water cycle. But the question is just as likely to be raised when dealing with large projects in the corporate world. The answer to…
Scrum is not your regular waterfall technique but an agile framework which changes and, at times, challenges traditional roles. The Organizational Resource Matrix is a hierarchical depiction of a combination of a functional organizational structure and a projectized organizational structure. Matrix organizations bring together team members for a project from different functional departments such as…
A typical Prioritized Product Backlog will contain all User Stories, their time estimates (including any revised estimates), and the status of higher priority requirements. Any new or revised User Stories resulting from changes to business requirements, customer requests, external market conditions, and/or lessons learned from previous Sprints are also incorporated. Product Backlog Review Meeting Also…
The Scrum framework is driven by the goal of delivering maximum business value in a minimum time span. One of the most effective tools for delivering the greatest value in the shortest amount of time is prioritization. Prioritizing can be defined as determining the order and separating what must be done now, from what needs…
In Scrum, the risk management activities are divided among various roles with some responsibility resting with everyone in the Scrum Team and the Scrum Master facilitating the process. Risk management is integral to ensuring value creation; therefore, risk management activities are performed throughout the project lifecycle and not just during project initiation. Each risk could…
In a large SCRUM project, Team Specialization may be required. There are three dimensions of Team Specialization. The first dimension is the need for accomplishing specific tasks. For example, one Specialized Team might be an integration team that has specialized knowledge of continuous integration.. That knowledge could be especially important when and if there is…
The Product Owner represents the interests of the stakeholder community to the Scrum Team. The Product Owner is responsible for ensuring clear communication of product or service functionality requirements to the Scrum Team, defining Acceptance Criteria, and ensuring those criteria are met. In other words, the Product Owner is responsible for ensuring that the…
It is widely known in the software development industry that Agile values “working software” over “extensive documentation.” This leads to the common misconception that Agile does not believe in documentation. It is true that documentation in Agile does not always mean typing code descriptions or lengthy time consuming information that may come in handy sometime…
