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15 votes
Accepted

How picky should I get with a team member's quality of work?

When Engineering Problems Become Project Management Problems One of the team members turns in code that is almost always bloated and inefficient, even though it technically works (although, from ...
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11 votes
Accepted

Problem with in Scrum team - with seniors

Parts of your question smack more of a workplace issue than a Project Management issue, but I'll answer what I can. Is this common in Scrum teams? Doesn't really have anything to do with Scrum. ...
  • 14.8k
9 votes

Strategy for whole team switching tehnologies

Don't do this. Speaking as a developer, this sounds great. We get to rewrite that horrible old spaghetti code from scratch! We get to paid to learn a new language! There's a mandate for quality, so ...
  • 14.8k
8 votes
Accepted

How to handle "bad quality code" by a team member

David tackled the psychological side pretty well. I'd like to offer a couple of technical solutions. Test Driven Development: If you have to write the test, before writing the code, then you're ...
8 votes

How does a Scrum Team handle traditional BA responsibilities?

To answer this effectively, it is important to split roles, job titles, and skills. Scrum has absolutely nothing to say about job titles, so we can actually resolve that fairly quickly by saying: as ...
  • 16.8k
7 votes

How does a "rockstar" performer integrate into an Agile team?

Here is the thing - the rockstar is rarely a good programmer. Most programmers which are great technically understand the need of teamwork. It is a core part of the job, something you need to ...
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7 votes

How to handle "bad quality code" by a team member

Human performance is complex but one thing is certain: we are not very reliable. There is a lot of material out there to study regarding this topic. There are theories around motivation, theories ...
7 votes

How to hire great people for a new startup company?

Notwithstanding my comment about the proper exchange, you are dealing with a normal problem of 1) prediction of future performance, and 2) how to attract good employees. The first problem is a huge ...
6 votes
Accepted

How does the Agile mindset contribute to a High Performing Team?

Agile, and in particular Scrum, is about creating a self-managed and self-organized team. Even if in a context different than software development (self-managing teams in a telecommunications company)...
6 votes

How does a "rockstar" performer integrate into an Agile team?

Find someone else. In agile it's all about team performance, not individual performance. Adding an individual to the team who doesn't fit in can really affect the rest of the team. If you can choose ...
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6 votes

Using A.I. and neural activity monitoring on workers? I am using it on my team. Why is it bad?

Even If It's Not Trolling, It's a Recipe for Creating Disastrous Outcomes This is (at best) tangentially on topic as a project management question, and may possibly be trolling. Even assuming good ...
  • 48.9k
5 votes

Problem with in Scrum team - with seniors

As a Scrum Master I always like to promote swarming: The idea is that you get all the developers to work (swarm) on a single story, instead of having each developer working on a separate story. The ...
5 votes
Accepted

Minutes of meetings of Daily SCRUM

First of all, with 8-9 developers, each having 1-3 impediments, it seems like the team is not really working together towards the same goal, but working very efficiently towards several goals. (and ...
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5 votes
Accepted

Everyone wants to talk, but no one listens

Help the team to move from storming to norming, see stages of group development. You can achieve this by: Present your observations to the team. Take care that you talk about observations and not ...
  • 1,767
5 votes

How does a "rockstar" performer integrate into an Agile team?

Summary They are mostly very talented individuals, but how can you use the tools Agile offers to help them have their freedom but also work with others? You are conflating things which are not ...
  • 48.9k
5 votes
Accepted

I need to adapt some kind of system to my work and work of my team

I see two problems here. our salesman likes to promise everything to everybody This is a clear example of siloing. The salesman is putting the Sales department's goals before the business's goals. ...
  • 14.8k
5 votes

Does a business analyst fit into the Scrum framework?

TL;DR The canonically-correct solution is to put someone with business analysis skills onto the Scrum Team in a Developer role, and then cross-train the whole Scrum Team. Cross-pollination of skills ...
  • 48.9k
4 votes

Misunderstandings about Collective Ownership in an Agile environment

What if the majority are wrong It can happen of course. I would expect any issues that arise from a wrong decision to be raised and discussed at retrospectives. Hopefully the team would then ...
4 votes

Misunderstandings about Collective Ownership in an Agile environment

"Collective code ownership" does not mean that everyone on the team gets a say on every line of code that's written. The code is still written by individuals (unless you're pair programming), and they ...
4 votes

How to manage a situation when one team member doesn't want to participate in retrospectives?

It sounds like it would be a good time to have a 'Retrospective of Retrospectives'. Start with a reminder of the purpose of having a retrospective and what the team is trying to get out of them. ...
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4 votes
Accepted

How to keep my team motivated during hard times?

This is a change management issue. Unfortunately, successful management of change - particularly negative change like what your organization is going through - has to start well in advance of the ...
  • 8,899
4 votes
Accepted

Frontend/backend feature team with little shared knowledge

Yes, put them together. There is only one way the teams will ever get shared knowledge, by sharing. It's also the only way you'll ever get to continuous integration/ deployment. Example: In a ...
4 votes

How do you get your team to participate in quality assurance practices: Refactoring

I'm usually in the opposite position - when developers want to do so much refactoring that it starts to encroach on delivering business value. That being said, refactoring is a process like any other, ...
  • 141
4 votes

Everyone wants to talk, but no one listens

A good project manager is a good facilitator. Someone who can guide healthy conversations and help the team get to, remember and follow through on their commitments and decisions. Taking a people ...
4 votes

Make Sure Developers Follow Requirements & Test Their Code

This sounds like a team maturity issue regarding software development in general and Agile Software Development specifically; yourself included. I’m not saying this as a harsh criticism, just an ...
4 votes
Accepted

Project Management and People Management

Neither Project Manager nor Scrum Master is normally a line-manager function. I don't know who came up with the idea of doing that in the first place, but it seems that mistake has been corrected. So ...
  • 8,348
4 votes
Accepted

What kind of approach would be deemed suitable for a team in which the members change frequently?

TL;DR There are a number of ways to accommodate team changes in your Sprint Planning. I detail three of them below. Use normed/smoothed/adjusted velocity as a planning value, not a management target. ...
  • 48.9k
4 votes

How to keep part-time members of an agile software development team informed?

One possibility would be using a tool like Slack. Create a team news channel. Anyone who hears any relevant news or notes any significant comments/events during the day will add them as a message on ...
4 votes

Does a business analyst fit into the Scrum framework?

I usually see BAs work in one of two ways. Sometimes they assist on items being developed in the current sprint by providing their domain expertise to developers, helping to fill in any missing ...
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4 votes

Does a business analyst fit into the Scrum framework?

There are two answers here - the Scrum answer and the my practical answer. In Scrum, there are three "accountabilities" (prior to the November 2020 revision, roles) on a Scrum Team - Scrum ...
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