Questions tagged [scrum]
For questions about using or implementing the Scrum framework.
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Too much to test on the last day of the sprint [duplicate]
How can I avoid the issue where a lot of stories are moved to Under Testing on the last day of the sprint?
The Under Testing column is manageable on most days but on the last day and there day before ...
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Cadence in Scrum
Scrum coaches say that a Scrum Team (often Scrum Developent Team is meant) should adhere to:
predictable cadence
delivering business value each Sprint
But at the same time Scrum emphasizes that ...
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From a sprint planning perspective, is it wrong to build an entire user interface before the API?
I'm currently reading 'Agile Estimating and Planning' by Mike Cohn and it mentions to not split by tasks like 'build user interface' and 'build middle tier', and instead to focus on building something ...
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Giving credit via Scrum or Kanban boards to developers participating in release-management and validation activities
I have a team of developers participating in two week Scrum sprints. We track our sprint progress (code pushes to QA region, bug-fixes, prod-support) in Jira. The team also participates in monthly ...
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How to build a feature backlog bottom up
Does anyone have any experience with bottom up product management? Essentially getting their teams to decide on the features and the direction of product?
In most of my previous teams - product ...
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How to handle a Sprint completed ahead of time? [duplicate]
Let's say we have a sprint of 2 weeks. In that sprint, the IT team has to implement some issues or features. How can we handle the case where the team finishes all issues/features ahead of time?
Do we ...
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How do you close out a Scrum Sprint in Azure Boards? Especially, what should you do with partially completed user stories and tasks?
I am new to Azure Boards and finding it can be very confusing when it comes to scrum sprint ends and planning the next sprint. What should you do with user stories and their tasks that are only ...
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How to store/manage a huge amount of coder task in the backlog
What to do when the programmers from the dev team want to put their development tasks in the product backlog (such as refactor XXX, clean class XXX, ...)?
We tried and have the users stories mixed ...
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Managing Contractors in a technology conversion effort of an application
We recently hired a firm to convert an application from .NET to .NET Core.
We have provided access to all repositories, they've been given an overall demo of major features and functions, access to a ...
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What's the point of having acceptance criteria when you have defined in a design document what you want done and how?
I recently found myself debating about the usefulness of acceptance criteria in a user story. Bear in mind that the team in question is not a feature team, it is a technical component team (if that ...
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Should we create sub-tasks for each story by default representing all the different types of work the story will require
One of my colleagues proposed an idea to split stories by default each time we write stories for the project into sub-tasks to represent different types of work a story has.
We are using Scrum and ...
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What does a Product Owner do if they disagree with the CEO's direction on product strategy?
What can, and should, a Product Owner / Product Manager do if the CEO has mandated that the team builds something which the Product Owner feels is not in the best interests of the customer?
Aside from ...
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Developer keeps underestimating tasks time
This is one of my first projects in charge, and I am leading a team of 2 dev, a senior and a mid-level one.
The mid-level developer is underestimating his time on most tasks. He is telling me that ...
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Name of methodology of a simple point-based task list of to-dos for the entire project?
In my career as a developer I had worked with multiple formal project management methodologies (Scrum, Kanban), the most productive team I ever worked for was in an startup that did:
A simple to-do ...
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How to coach a domineering PO to let go and allow a team to become self-managing
The Product Owner that I am working with has agreed "to try this self-organising stuff" on our Scrum team.
Long story short I convinced her that there are 2 paths for the team. One in which ...
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Recommended framework to organize a 12-developers team that will work on different products
The developers team is composed of 12 people. Several products need to be built, and although these products benefit the same line of business in the company, they are not necessarily related each ...
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Design Specification Ownership: how to protect it from obfuscation and excessive adjustments on Enterprise project?
By Design Specification Ownership I mean that nobody can read it right as expected except the author/ideologist/creator.
If a person works on the same project for a long time and keeps the same ...
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How to boost internal communication within a Scrum Team
I have collected feedback from my team about what area they want to work on and that is internal communication.
They want to improve the frequency and quality of interactions basically. So asking and ...
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Cancelled project retrospective format
Can anyone recommend a retrospective format for a cancelled project?
The attendees will be the development team but also some of the more senior stakeholders.
The idea is to reflect on the hard work ...
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How does a Scrum Team handle traditional BA responsibilities?
Linked Question
This question was proposed by the participants of the discussion of the previous, more general question.
Question
The business analyst's work often implies a kind of waterfall-ish or ...
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Does a business analyst fit into the Scrum framework?
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Let's consider a software development project made for an external customer. The development company (the vendor) has the usual positions and specialists: developers, testers, business ...
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How do you differentiate between Product & (Dev) Ops activities for an Agile project?
I have worked with various sizes of organisations and everyone has had a way of seperating between DevOps (Engineering) activities and Product (Functionality development) activities.
Some had ...
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The career path of a Scrum Master
A Scrum Master has a pretty small team (as per the Scrum Guide) and it's not recommended for a Scrum Master to work with more than two teams. Agile and Scrum are still not everywhere adopted, ...
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Trying to understand my CFD
Newbee to the agile world, we are practicing kanban in our organization and we use Jira to manage our flows. I am trying to understand the CFD Jira generates for us, but the whole CFD idea confuses me....
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What if developers don't want to spend their time on manual testing?
I have experience of working with a team where developers didn't want to do manual testing because they considered it to be wasting of their time - QA work (especially manual testing) doesn't improve ...
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In corona lockdown time, how to substitute daily scrum/stand-up meetings?
We adopted scrum in the past as the project management paradigm. However one of the cornerstones of scrum is the daily stand-up meeting.
In corona lockdown era (or any time where it is relevant) this ...
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On-time delivery vs Fast delivery
Asking a Scrum Team to deliver valuable shippable increment each Sprint leads to reinsurance - team members will put additional time/Story Points in their estimates, thus reducing TTM (Time To Market)...
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How should I deal with common dependencies when estimating stories in Scrum?
There's something that has always bothered me with Scrum. Hopefully I can get some insight here.
With Scrum, we try to break the backlog down in vertical slices. Let's say stories A and B. These ...
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QA is at capacity, Development has room
Let's say you have five developers and one QA tester.
All 5 developers can commit to X number of user stories.
In Planning, QA decides he'll need Y number of hours per story to test.
What is the ...
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Is a Product Owner's approval part of DoD?
Is DoD supposed to include a Product Owner's approval, i.e. does DoD for User Stories include the following:
the User Story is approved by PO using Acceptance Criteria for this Story
Or does DoD ...
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What is a productive, efficient Scrum team?
How does a Scrum Master, a Product Owner know whether a Scrum Team gives much or little usefulness to a customer?
In other words, what is a productive, efficient Scrum team?
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If we cannot complete all tasks in a sprint
This is an online question on the Certified Scrum Master (CSM) v7.0 (CSM-001). However, I don't understand why the answer is A instead of D:
You are the Scrum Master. The Sprint will complete in two ...
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How to estimate sprint velocity when there is a change in story points in scrum
Initially, the Product Backlog contained 350 story points of PBIs. After completing 7 sprints of development, the Product Backlog contains 140 story points of PBIs .
The average velocity is 30 per ...
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Under what circumstances should outsiders attend a scrum team’s ceremonies?
I work with a team of 5 scrum masters each of which has one or 2 teams.
There is one agile coach.
The agile coach wants to “observe” all the ceremonies of my team. He wants to do this to “coach” me. ...
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Financial indicators of a project and a project manager's efficiency
A project manager's responsibility is to lead a project to a successful completion, which includes finishing the project on time, a happy customer, a proud team, etc. But it also includes financial ...
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The successful Sprint rate vs Reserving additional time within a Sprint
Let's suppose that a Scrum team have a velocity of 50 Story Points per a Sprint. During a Sprint Planning Meeting they add some Stories to the Sprint Backlog until the total sum of these Stories gets ...
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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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Scrum and interruptions (urgent bugs, requests)
Does Scrum take into account interruptions? For example:
urgent bugs from production environment
requests from other teams
This is very important in real development process.
In practice of Scrum ...
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How do you make the Teams Retrospective Actions visible and ensure they get attention throughout the Sprint?
After a Retro we usually have 2 or 3 Actions to address in the next Sprint. Some of these Actions are sometimes more of a reminder to Developers.
Who do we ensure they are addressed in Sprint?
We're ...
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How do you know a half of a Sprint Backlog is already done?
During an interview I was asked - how do you understand that the team has already completed a half of the Sprint Backlog?
How do we do this? Was I supposed to say that we need to sum up all the user ...
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What framework or methodology would you recommend for a Data Science team?
I am a Scrum Master for a team of mostly Data Scientists and some Software Engineers and a Product Owner.
Our organisation has decided that all teams work in 2 week sprints using Scrum. I personally ...
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How does Planning Poker work in a cross-functional team?
Let's suppose we have a common Scrum team comprised of a frontend developer (one or two), backend developer (one or two), tester, designer. Let's further suppose that we need to estimate a User Story ...
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What to do when the team prefers private communications on mail and chat over collaborative tools like Jira?
I've noticed that a lot of discussion between a developer and a Product Owner happens in private conversations in various communication tools (Skype, Slack, email, etc). The reason is because these ...
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Is there planning in Scrum?
As a project manager/scrum master, I has been required to make sure that the team completes the work that was planned for a Sprint and, what is more important, for a Release. Are these demands correct?...
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Using burndown chart to estimate the completion date of a Scrum project
I sometimes read about using the burndown chart to estimate the date when the Scrum project ends. It's often described like this:
estimate all features of the product and sum them up (...
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If a team isn’t broken but isn’t a scrum team what should a SM do?
I have recently joined a new scrum team as the scrum master.
They are high performing and stakeholders are happy with their value delivery. Their decisions are swift and their ceremonies are optimal.
...
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How do we refine a big User Story in Jira?
Let's suppose a Product Owner added a big User Story to Product Backlog in Jira. This User Story can't be done during a Sprint or even during several Sprints. How do we refine such a User Story in ...
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Are User Stories from Sprint Backlog assigned to individual developers?
Let's suppose the development team is planning the next Sprint. What does it technically mean that a User Story is added to the Sprint Backlog? Is it assigned to a developer or to the whole team? (If ...
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How to (Agile) manage a fairly complex IT PoC?
I'm a technical lead employed by in an agile IT organization where most teams observe Scrum.
I'm 2 weeks into a task of building a proof-of-concept of a service that is fairly sizable and complex (...
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Is it SM or PO role to update team on requests from outside stakeholders, such as SW upgrades?
Collaboration can happen outside the Scrum Team from other stakeholders when there is a special work request to be relayed down to the Scrum Team. In other words, a Scrum Team does not live in a ...
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