Use this tag for any questions that involve agile processes from the perspective of a project manager or similar role.
0
votes
0answers
45 views
Agile/Scrum Software Comparison [closed]
I've been looking for comparisons between various pieces of software for tracking a team of about twenty developers (including stakeholders, managers, and area leads).
I'm currently looking at either ...
2
votes
2answers
92 views
Good source for synonyms for user stories in agile methodology
I find myself in an non-agile environment where "user story" actually means "use case, backed by an excel requirements specification, a testing specification doc, and a few required wireframes || mock ...
8
votes
4answers
208 views
Dynamic length of sprints in Scrum
I have been working several projects with Scrum method and, in some, we have taken the decision of execute Scrum sprints of dynamic length (every sprint).
For me it have some advantages:
Adapt the ...
-4
votes
1answer
85 views
iPad for Scrum to Skype or Google Hangout [closed]
I am thinking of using iPad as a Scrum tool to Skype/Google Hangout to coordinate better with our offshore team in a different country.
I am planning to hang the iPad onto the scrum board ...
11
votes
10answers
332 views
How to allow developers to get enough quality development time while keeping to support & maintenance obligations
I work for a small company of 6 multi skilled developers where we have developed our own product which requires constant improvement but also maintenance and support to the current release from end ...
8
votes
6answers
200 views
What is the standard for evaluating team maturity?
There are ever so many references to the team's 'maturity' in the Agile/Lean related books and articles/blogs.
Using my common sense I think I can get the idea. I can see how my team has evolved over ...
6
votes
6answers
211 views
Can a Product Owner be a developer in SCRUM?
Can a Product Owner be a developer in SCRUM? In theory yes but is it recommended by SCRUM?
1
vote
2answers
99 views
Quickly explain how to make estimation work to an external business stakeholder
Scenario: need to quickly explain how the estimation will work to an external business stakeholder; can't take more than few minutes really. The project area is web development.
P.S. There's no point ...
1
vote
4answers
141 views
How can we transition to Agile estimation based on complexity or effort of user stories?
We have being practicing agile development methodologies for a long time as a development company. Most of the time our product owners tries to have a map between story points and time. As a example, ...
3
votes
2answers
173 views
Visualizing individuals' efforts with kanban. Is it a wrong approach for measuring the team's throughput?
I'm new to kanban and agile as such but I'm really positive and enthusiastic and I have a clean vision of it's potential for us. I made a decision to start off with a first board and take it from ...
1
vote
3answers
131 views
Agile for web development - How detailed does the plan have to be?
I am in the process of starting a website build and previously it has just been a case of :
Get designs
Start implementing site by incrementally building the style and functionality
That's it. No ...
8
votes
3answers
209 views
In Scrum, who is responsible for the project's budget?
I have read many books about Scrum, blogs and academic articles. Though, all of them dodge from explicitly acknowledging this question:
Who is responsible for the project's money? Why is this person ...
0
votes
3answers
143 views
Story Points to Ideal Days
History
I work within a IT Team for my business that delivers (Develops & Unit Tests, QA, UAT and Releases) either system improvements or new systems to different areas of our business.
The team ...
1
vote
1answer
83 views
How best to 'leanify' test case documentation?
I'm currently reviewing some test case artifacts for various project teams as standardized by our organization. However, I'm a bit appalled to find that a lot of content is being captured in documents ...
5
votes
2answers
149 views
Why does Pivotal Tracker discourage estimating points for bugs and chores?
Pivotal Tracker "strongly discourages" estimating velocity points for bugs and chores – you have to change a setting and accept a warning to be able to do it.
They explain why here, but I just don't ...
6
votes
4answers
225 views
Communicating requirements to offshore teams
Just to give a context, there is an offshore team in India for a client in San Francisco. The offshore team is about 9 developers and 4 QA, with one project manager. I am doing onsite coordination for ...
-1
votes
1answer
69 views
Project metric definitions
I often read about Agile development in blogs. It seems that some PM terms are sometimes mentioned with slightly different meanings depending on the context. Could you transcribe from a book (either ...
7
votes
8answers
677 views
What is better: a physical Scrum board or an online board?
I used to practice Scrum with a physical board. We often faced problems when working with distributed teams or just when going into a meeting room. So I decided to implement a SaaS service to provide ...
3
votes
2answers
209 views
Need a good example for what a self-organizing team looks like
In Agile/Scrum teams, the concept of a self-organizing team and the notion that "the team owns all the stories, individuals don’t" is turning out to be difficult to communicate. I have seen lots of ...
4
votes
3answers
208 views
How can developers and testers agree on story point estimates?
Previously we used duration for each story, but in our current sprint we are using story points (effort) keeping test team effort separate from the development team effort. Story points are based on ...
1
vote
4answers
103 views
Are SCRUM iterations meaningful?
Sitrep: I have finished a story that I could not complete within iteration while it was planned to be completed. It's necessary to get this done and ASAP since it's a prerequisite for other stories ...
5
votes
3answers
160 views
In an agile consultancy, is the Client the Product Owner?
I'm interested in understanding how agile project management differs between a single product-focused team and a digital agency or software development consulting firm.
For starters, in a situation ...
8
votes
4answers
182 views
How to effectively combine different (project and non-project) activities in Kanban?
In our company, we're currently trying to get started with Kanban. When discussing about how to handle the different work items / user stories / tasks, this question came up:
How do you ...
6
votes
2answers
121 views
In our Agile/Scrum team, should we move or split incomplete stories?
Our Agile/Scrum teams are getting better at taking on manageable workload and completing them fully. However, sometimes for a variety of good reasons, some of the stories are not fully done at the end ...
7
votes
5answers
293 views
Team velocity fluctuates a lot, how to find the root cause?
I have plotted my team burn up chart and its velocity per iteration. To me it looks really bad (velocity fluctuates a lot). What should I be looking for to diagnose the root cause of this behaviour?
...
7
votes
4answers
214 views
How to keep WIP down with swarming in Agile/Scrum teams?
We are practicing swarming in our Agile/Scrum teams. However, keeping WIP (Work in Progress) down continues to be a challenge. I am familiar with the theory, but I have some questions about the ...
6
votes
3answers
143 views
How do you set an initial duration for agile projects?
I am researching agile methodologies for my organization. My question is this:
How do you prevent a project from running for far too long while using agile?
You can be writing requirements while ...
4
votes
3answers
107 views
What are the right conclusions to draw from the success or failure of a Sprint?
I recently encountered the opinion that, if a Sprint is successful due to statistical reasons (e.g. the team made big mistakes during planning but the team delivered its stories anyway), then that's ...
6
votes
3answers
132 views
How can I increase management buy-in of Agile adoption?
In my current role we manage our web development using Scrum. This has been really successful within our team (improving productivity, spotting issues early and increasing collaboration) but outside ...
5
votes
5answers
122 views
contracts on inputs and outputs between subsystem teams?
My project consists of 5 sub-teams and I think that what most people under-appreciate is subsystem communication.
Do you think that teams using (or even being forced to) contracts between them to ...
12
votes
4answers
337 views
Is there any pm methodology that works well on large projects?
My team historically has averaged about 40 people over several years, often more than that. We have a pretty complex product that cuts across several problem domains. We switched from waterfall to ...
6
votes
2answers
145 views
Is it possible to track velocity on a waterfall project?
Assuming similar work has been done in the past, can velocity be measured on a waterfall project? If that isn't the case, is there a more appropriate capacity management tool on a waterfall project?
5
votes
1answer
148 views
How to collect Burn Down data during Sprints?
We just started with Scrum and are in our first sprint for a new software product. So far everything went well. As Scrum Master (former Project Manager) I build up all the knowledge I could find and ...
7
votes
4answers
348 views
In an Agile environment, how should a developer update team members and managers when there's no “visible” progress?
A developer is working on a research project that involves working with new technologies. The concepts are also new to the developer, and the developer is working on building a product on top of the ...
11
votes
6answers
479 views
How to apply daily stand-up meetings with a large team on multiple projects
Background
There are:
4 .Net Developers
4 PHP Developers
2 QA Specialists
2 Integration Specialists
2 Analysts
3 PMs
11 Projects in active development. None are trivial. Some are programs with ...
10
votes
3answers
494 views
How to spot the lazy team member in a self-organized team?
Some context first: I am a project manager in a software development company with a Kanban environment. In the team I am managing there is no such thing as people reporting their work to me, or people ...
9
votes
3answers
307 views
Handling bugs in the Scrum process?
I have recently gone live with a big project. To meet a tight deadline some technical debt was accumulated but the true extent only became apparent after go live.
As this is intended to be a ...
7
votes
2answers
151 views
Tool for Managing the Feature Development Process
Background: we currently use MantisBT for tracking of bug tickets, and have attempted to use the same for feature development. The latter has worked, but only to a point. Ours is a small shop, so ...
2
votes
3answers
269 views
Is there any agile web project management “tutorials”?
I've read many resources on the web about agile web project management and I think I understand the theory behind it. Now I would like to find few examples built like full "tutorials" in order to be ...
4
votes
2answers
146 views
Hiring new team with limited resources using Scrum
My team consists of 4 people
Myself (Division Director, Senior Developer and Project Manager (adhoc PM))
Emp1 (Data Administrator/Data Entry for entire agency)
Emp2 (Junior Developer - Have not ...
4
votes
3answers
209 views
How frequently can a release happen within a Scrum Sprint?
I am aware that the length of a Scrum Sprint can vary on a case to case basis. This raises the following questions:
How can product releases be handled within the Sprint time-box?
How frequently can ...
13
votes
6answers
367 views
How to better balance resources in a cross-functional agile team?
I am the project manager for a team composed of employees who were hired specifically as QA or development prior to agile/scrum being adopted by the organization. Just for background, I came into the ...
1
vote
1answer
83 views
Agile management roles [closed]
I need to choose between business sponsor, business visionary and business ambassador. Here is the scenario:
Jane is one the owners and managing director she is the budget holder of the project and ...
2
votes
1answer
97 views
How to add story points to card display in Greenhopper Kanban Work view?
The configuration options in admin so far only allow me to edit the display of cards in Classic views.
3
votes
1answer
81 views
What should be in an Atlassian toolkit for website PM?
I'm requisitioing some tools for a large scale web development project.
Intending to start with the following:
JIRA for issues tracking, wiki, git or svn hosting
Greenhopper plugin for agile PM
...
6
votes
5answers
407 views
Is Agile feasible for a large financial application?
I am considering using Scrum on a very large (40+ developers) multi year project for a major bank.
I am trying to figure out if Agile is feasible for a project this size. There are thousands of ...
5
votes
4answers
242 views
Sizing an entire backlog using story points
I'm a PM on a large multi-year project with a sizable backlog of work implementing Scrum in 4 week release cycles. I hold weekly backlog grooming sessions with the project team and key business ...
8
votes
5answers
225 views
Agile/scrum - tracking time spent in current iteration towards stories from the next iteration if all current stories are done
Our team has been slowly trying to go towards agile, and like many other teams, up to this point, the question of "what do we do when we actually finish all commitments?" is fairly new and foreign to ...
23
votes
5answers
807 views
Is Scrum a status report meeting or a developer meeting?
I'm a developer and we started using Agile last year (October 2011). And, it has been rough to say the least. I was always taught Scrum was to discuss the following:
What you did yesterday
What ...
0
votes
1answer
216 views
Agile methodology - How to have an effective sprint retrospective? [closed]
I am the scrum master in my scrum team. At the end of a sprint, we have a sprint retrospective, and we comment on what good things we noticed in the sprint. We also comment on the bad things and what ...
