InfoQ Homepage Scrum Content on InfoQ
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User Story: a Placeholder for a Conversation
User stories are meant to be a placeholder for a conversation. This article dives into the differences between user stories and tickets, where stories came from and how recent trends are moving us away from conversations. It shows the impact this is having on product development and easy ways to improve collaboration through conversation and writing better stories.
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Shift in Sprint Review Mindset: from Reporting to Inclusive Ideation
Sprint Reviews should foster a dynamic environment of creativity, exploration, and continual refinement, where important product and overall business decisions are taken. In this article, we will explore the substantial mindset shift and routine change from a typical reporting-focused to interactive data-driven culture of Sprint Reviews.
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How to Rebuild Tech Culture for Those Who Survived the Layoffs
A wave of layoffs hit the software industry and changed the definition of tech culture. This article explores the situation across multiple tech companies, and the diverse choices made to support employees who survived, and those they had to say good-bye to. It provides suggestions for those of us who have stayed behind, and how to rebuild culture in our tech teams.
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Group Coaching - Extending Growth Opportunity beyond Individual Coaching
This article provides an introduction to group coaching and explains how it is different from individual coaching. It sheds light on the benefits of using group coaching, skills that coaches would need and the challenges they would face, with an example scenario using one of the group coaching techniques, and describes the context in which such a technique can be used.
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When, Why and How Facilitation Skills Help Scrum Teams
Effective Facilitation helps Scrum and Agile Teams leverage differences in positive ways, guiding teams to frame their discussions with clear purpose, decisions, outcomes and engagement with one another. This article talks about how facilitation can make or break team interactions, the amount of facilitation needed in certain scenarios, how to drive decisions with facilitation, and more.
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Are Your “Value Streams” Keeping You Stuck in the Past?
The essence of business agility is being able to respond quickly and systematically to feedback. As a means of achieving business agility, value stream management falls short, and ends up being not very different from what organizations have done for a long time: using program management practices to coordinate work across different teams in a large organization.
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POCs, Scrum, and the Poor Quality of Software Solutions
POCs and Scrum can play a critical role in implementing Quality software solutions. Poor quality often starts with a POC that was prematurely turned into the development pipeline. Scrum short sprints often create an environment most conductive to working reactively to constantly-changing requirements making it hard for developers to prioritize and achieve Quality over the course of the project.
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Talking about Sizing and Forecasting in Scrum
Scrum Teams can use different approaches to size the effort to deliver a Sprint/Product Goal. The forecast will be wrong. We're moving one Sprint at a time, and refreshing forecasts frequently. Some would say, "Discover and deliver capabilities—review outcomes with the customers and end-users. Learn what can be learned. Act on what we have discovered. Don't manage expectations."
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How to Optimize for Fast Flow Using Alignment and Autonomy: the Journey of a Large Bureaucracy
This article describes how NAV (Norwegian Labor and Welfare Administration), Norway's largest bureaucracy, has achieved alignment in over 100 autonomous teams. It shows the techniques it uses to align teams with respect to technology: two descriptive techniques - the technology radar and the weekly deep dive, and two normative techniques - the technical direction and internal platforms.
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Why the Dual Operating Model Impedes Enterprise Agility
Most organizations adopt a dual approach to agility, with some parts of the organization working in an agile way that delivers value in increments, measures the response and adapts accordingly, while the “traditional” organization continues to work as it always has in a relatively top-down way. In this article, This approach must eventually be left behind after an Agile transition.
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How Space Shapes Collaboration: Using Anthropology to Break Silos
Software companies strive to keep innovating and changing the rules of the market. These companies are made of people who, unlike smartphones, personal computers or smart watches, have not evolved as much in recent years. This article proposes an analysis of workspaces from anthropology to solve one of the most common problems: the appearance of silos instead of a culture of collaboration.
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Lessons Learned from Self-Selection Reteaming at Redgate
Redgate Software runs a yearly deliberate reteaming process across engineering to alter how they invest the efforts of teams and encourage people to move towards the work they find most engaging. Self-selection reteaming is an effective and empowering method of aligning with company goals. It normalized the idea of people moving between teams for personal development and renewed sense of purpose.