Questions tagged [scrum]
For questions about using or implementing the Scrum framework.
1,647
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Why use story points instead of hours for estimating?
After using hours to estimate our projects for a long time and rarely coming within 20% of actual "work-to-ship," I have been told by a handful of people that "points" work a lot better at gauging the ...
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Why can't the ScrumMaster and the project manager be the same person?
How a ScrumMaster does compare to a traditional project manager, and can either role coincide with the role of product manager or project sponsor / project owner?
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When to Use Waterfall, When to Use Scrum ?
Where I lecture, I was always taught to use waterfall to manage projects, but when I finished college, waterfall wasn't the only method that can be used for project management, and I am very ...
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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 you ...
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67
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8
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How to deal with unavoidable on-demand tasks in Scrum? Or should we even try?
I was put in charge of implementing Scrum in my Development Team. Unfortunately, the company I work with has a rather stale structure that does not go well with this framework. The team works on a ...
60
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7
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Why aren't you supposed to report status in standups?
My team has a new scrum master. The old SM always said that standups were about coordination between the team members and not a report to him. Urging us to help each other if one of us ran into ...
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55
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12
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Why are developers expected to estimate tasks at all?
This management tendency is the worst part of being a developer. Software development is not carpentry. Almost everything a developer writes is unique, they have never built that particular thing ...
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53
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14
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Where to Find a Desktop Kanban board application? [closed]
I have been looking for a week now, all over the net for a simple desktop based kanban management system. I work in a distributed team, but my company won't accept to use an exterior webapp like ...
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Should bugs be treated as stories or as tasks?
If you're using scrum you should know that there is a clear difference between tasks and stories. A story is something that is valuable to user. A task is a step to produce that value to user.
So, ...
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44
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7
answers
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Daily standup vs. Micro-management
Why isn't the daily scrum considered to be micromanagement?
Under any other circumstances expecting to get a daily update from developers would be considered micromanagement. Maybe even pico-...
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7
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Why do all the teams that I have worked with always finish a sprint without completion of all the stories?
I am developer, I have worked with three Agile teams for the last eight years, with different organisations. The organisations have had a mix of Scrum, Kanban & Lean Startup Mindsets.
I have ...
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9
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Strict or pragmatic Scrum?
Do you practice Scrum strictly after its rules or are you going a more pragmatic way, picking out the bits that suit you/your environment best, maybe mixing it up with other methodologies ? In other ...
35
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16
answers
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How long should an Agile Sprint be?
I'm currently the PM on a project that is scheduled to run for about 14 months. The current sprint structure is 4 weeks of development; week 5 allows us to show the progress to the client, deploy it ...
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8
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How can a Scrum daily not be a status pull?
There's a widespread saying
The Scrum daily is not a status pull; if it is - you are not doing Scrum.
By "status pull" is meant everyone from the development team reporting they have done ...
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34
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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, both for the current release from ...
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34
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7
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Advice for dealing with a cowboy programmer in an agile team
We have a cowboy coder in our team i.e. he likes to take advantage developing some new features or tools that are not always requested nor useful. We use scrum/kanban for development, and it is quite ...
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How do you schedule delivery dates in Scrum?
I've run into a constant issue. When a project starts, the client typically has a list of functionalities to be built in to the application. As a team we would like to follow Scrum. But the next thing ...
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Which Scrum certification provider is most widely recognized or accepted?
I am planning to go for Scrum Master certification, and while researching the certification providers, I could not clearly make up my mind about which one was most widely accepted.
There are two ...
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10
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Should I cancel the daily scrum if the team has only minor issues to discuss?
If there are only minor issues to discuss in the next Daily Scrum, should I hold that Daily Scrum as usual or just tell the Scrum Master to cancel that Daily Scrum and deal with the issues by email or ...
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Why does management have to "buy into" Scrum?
I have read over and over that in order for Scrum to work, "Management has to buy into Scrum." Can you tell me why that is? What management are they talking about, the company stakeholders that have ...
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Why do Scrum user stories only use the Fibonacci series?
I know that user stories in Scrum are measured with a Modified Fibonacci sequence (0.5, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40...). Why does Scrum only use Fibonacci numbers to estimate stories?
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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?
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Scrum, Agile, Kanban looking for 'for dummies' type of information [closed]
I'm sure I'm not alone in this. I have heard and read a lot of snippets of information about this topic and I've formed my own understanding - probably not the best way to assess the value or try to ...
28
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7
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Why use both story points and hours?
I'm a new scrum master for a team that is using story point estimation and hours. We do story points first during grooming and then hours during planning.
I always thought of story points as being ...
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27
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3
answers
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Can Scrum be suited to smaller development teams?
I'm not a 100% certain that this is the best place for this question as it's a little more development methodology related than directly project management related.
I work at a company where the ...
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27
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6
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Any tips on how to 'sell' the necessity of dealing with technical debt to nontechnical stakeholders?
A number of stakeholders do not quite understand the necessity of dealing with technical debt preferring new features on top of not very maintainable code. Development is sometimes seen as kids who ...
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4
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How do handle adhoc work during a sprint from pressing customers
I intend to introduce sprints to my company, fairly new to it myself. Not sure if it's appropriate for my current situation, we have several on going projects, all of them are ERP scale size and most ...
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26
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6
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Can PRINCE2 and SCRUM work together?
This question has raised a debate within my organization with multiple points of view.
Several Project Managers think that they are completely different things aiming for different results whereas ...
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4
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How should a team handle disagreements about story-point estimates in Scrum?
During estimation, the Product Owner presents a user story that seems clear to a team that usually knows their strengths and weaknesses, and that is not hostile. What should the Scrum Master do if the ...
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3
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Scaled scrum/agile frameworks (SAFe vs. Nexus vs. LeSS) comparison
Would someone please shed some light on the differences between:
LeSS: https://less.works/
Nexus: https://www.scrum.org/Resources/The-Nexus-Guide
SAFe: https://www.scaledagileframework.com/
...
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26
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What is a “battery”?
I was very surprised to read, in this question, the mention of “batteries” as a PM tool, seemingly linked to Scrum. The OP talks about an article about their use, but none of my desperate Googling ...
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6
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Should I ask my boss not to come to retrospectives?
I am a Scrum Master for a small team (8 devs). I have been having trouble getting engagement from many of the team members, especially the junior team members. My boss missed two retrospectives ...
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6
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Where should design be incorporated in an agile process?
We use a scrum-based agile development process. But where should design get incorporated? Separate user stories? Tasks on stories?
We currently think of design as a separate task and break it out as ...
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3
answers
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In Scrum, how to estimate research stories?
In our Scrum team, when there is uncertainty about a story or the team is not sure about how to implement it, we take up a research story first. Based on the findings of this research story, we are ...
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Which sticky note is the stickiest?
The question might sound a tad silly, but I'm actually trying to solve a real problem.
Our team room has a glass wall, which we also use as our kanban board with hand-written swimlanes (= status) and ...
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6
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Which is better: large feature branches or merging frequently? Which is better small work items vs large work items?
My team has problems pushing work items through all the stages in the Kanban board to done.
The work items hit code review and pile up and stay there for a long time. The following stage (the QA stage)...
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24
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7
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Is Certified Scrum Master valuable?
What is the value in Certified Scrum Master certifications? I'll be quite honest in saying that I've never put a lot of thought into such certifications, but it seems like if you are interested in ...
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answers
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Difference between grooming and refinement
What is the difference between the terms "grooming" and "refinement" of the product backlog in scrum methodology?
I am not able to find an accurate answer to this question. Are they the same?
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How to make Scrum of Scrums meetings more productive?
At my job, we're having a Scrum of Scrums meeting where all the Scrum Masters get together. This meeting is turning into a boring meeting where everyone gives their status update. I'm trying to make ...
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Task estimation for PMs who are not developers
While working Agile, how can a PM estimate a task when he/she is not a developer?
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15
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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 ...
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3
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Sprint Backlog vs Product Backlog
I was always under impression that Sprint Backlog is part of Product Backlog -> it's impossible to add anything into Sprint Backlog without affecting Product Backlog
However, according to one of the ...
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23
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How to apply Scrum in fixed date, fixed budget project?
Considering that we work on a project with fixed deadlines and fixed budget and we use Scrum: what are best practices we should use to make this setup successful? Since Scrum wasn't directly designed ...
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How can a Scrum team work with a Waterfall team
My Scrum team needs an API to retrieve data. It's not overly complicated, essentially its just one request that gets sent to the API and then the API returns some data. This is the end of the journey.
...
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How do I overcome a bottleneck in a team's process, when what people are telling me doesn't match what I see
I started a new job a few months ago as a scrum master.
The team was and still is having problems completing their tasks during the sprint.
Initially the problems seemed to be tasks that were too ...
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6
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What is a failed sprint?
A sprint has just ended. All stories, but one were done by the software engineers. Should the sprint be labeled as 'failed' because of the story that was not completed? What exactly is a failed sprint?...
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What is the difference between Scrum and XP?
Everything is in the title: What is the difference between Scrum and eXtreme Programming? Is it possible to have a simple but explicit explanation?
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Sprint vs milestone vs release
I am new in agile and Scrum, and I got confused as to what the differences are between a Sprint, a Milestone and a Release.
I heard some say that the Sprint is a Milestone. Also in some software the ...
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In scrum should incomplete stories be re-estimated or does the original estimate get burned down when it's finally completed?
If I have a story that's been estimated at 10 story points and we don't manage to complete it in a sprint how do you handle estimates for the sprint in which it's next included (assuming it gets ...
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Help - Technical team does not want to work in agile way
I am a Product Owner on a Scrum Team whose developers do not want to embrace work in an agile, incremental fashion. Simple example: the customer currently has to contact us to create users each time ...
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