Business justification demonstrates the reasons for undertaking a project. It answers the question “Why is this project needed?” Business justification drives all decision making related to a project. So, it is important to assess the viability and achievability of a project not only before committing to significant expenditures or investment at initial stages of the…
Agile principle states, “The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.”This is why Scrum recommends co-located teams. But with the changing business realities and globalization, co-located teams are becoming more and more difficult and are slowly being replaced with distributed teams. You might ask, what…
Scrum Teams—often referred to as development teams and responsible for the development of products and services—consist of a group of individuals who work on customer requirements to create deliverables for the project. It is important for the team to possess all the essential skills to carry out the work in the project. The optimum size…
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…
Being an Agile approach, Scrum is highly flexible (pun, probably intended); that is, it can be stretched and bent to fit any project’s requirements. It is best suited for projects that require splitting a huge and unplanned project into manageable chunks of work based on business priorities such as value. As such, it can be…
If an entire project or portions of it are being completed under a contract, the contract defines the scope of work and the specific terms of the contract. The type of contract used influences project risk. Some of the most common types of contracts used in Scrum projects are as follows: Incremental Delivery Contract—This contract…
One of the criteria for deciding between the Kanban or Scrum Agile frameworks can be the time required. One of these works well when there is shortage of time in terms of deadlines; the other one works well in situations where more time is required to carry out tasks, when a diminutive iteration cannot satisfy…
The answer to this question is No. Release planning is a very important part of the Scrum process. In this process, the Scrum Core Team reviews the User Stories in the Prioritized Product Backlog to develop a Release Planning Schedule, which is essentially a phased deployment schedule that can be shared with the project stakeholders.…
Personas are highly detailed fictional characters, representative of the majority of users and of other stakeholders who may not directly use the end product. Personas are created to identify the needs of the target user base. Creating specific Personas can help the team better understand users and their requirements and goals. Based on a Persona,…
Competing video game companies—one that operates inside of the Scrum framework and one that does not—release similar games around the same time. The graphics and story-lines in each are fantastic. As gamer’s button mash their way through the campaigns, however, disparities emerge. Unlike its competitor, the company that operates inside of the Scrum framework finds…
