Kick off your Team with a Retrospective Starting your scrum team off the right way can be the difference between success and failure. Here’s a great idea to set them up for success, by starting by looking back – with a retrospective. Everyone has their own way of kicking off a scrum team. Some Scrum […]
Estimation a drag? Get the whole team involved. While it might seem counter-intuitive, getting your entire team involved in the estimation process will end up providing more clarity, and actually improve your plans overall. Let’s just admit it. Estimating stories or other backlog items is not fun. A lot of times it can even become […]
Conduct your daily scrum in front of the task board The daily scrum provides team members an update on exactly what’s happened over the last 24 hours, what has been learned, and what sort of adjustments need to be made over the next 24 hours. However, have you ever thought about how you’re hosting your […]
Want to meet for a coffee? … Oh right. Whether you think it’s a great idea or not, you’ve probably found yourself working as part of a remote team over the past few weeks, and none of us know exactly when it’s going to end. For those of us who thrive on the agile idea […]
The ScrumMaster trends report 2019 showed that women in the ScrumMaster role are taking home a higher salary than their male counterparts. Those with training and certification were doing even better than those without. Here at ThinkLouder, we’ve seen that women are eager and excited to get the ScrumMaster certification under their belts. In fact, […]
Here’s how introducing yellow and red meeting cards can help you focus your teams meetings, and stop them getting taken off track. We’ve all been there when a meeting loses focus. Sometimes participants get too far in the weeds, sometimes they start talking about things that aren’t relevant, or maybe start talking about redundant things […]
Use Defect Thresholds to Help Product Quality Most scrum teams have backlogs that contain more than just user stories and new product features. Oftentimes, they contain bugs and defects that have been reported by customers or users or even by the team itself. These aren’t always handled right away. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, […]
Agile QuickTip: Using Multiple Choice Estimates If you ever find that estimating tasks during sprint planning is painful and argumentative then multiple choice estimates might really help with your team’s planning. Most scrum teams follow a similar path during sprint planning. Team members will break user stories or backlog items down into individual implementation tasks […]
Don’t manage cross-team dependencies – eliminate them. One of the biggest challenges that a scrum team has to contend with when working in a multi-team, or scaled enterprise environment is managing cross-team dependencies. This is where your team is dependent on some other team to deliver something of their own, before you can make any […]
How Do You Capture Your User Stories and Product Ideas? Try Index Cards Here’s an out of the box idea that at first glance might seem counter-intuitive. I believe that user stories and product ideas should be born on index cards, rather than immediately logged electronically. Most Agile or scrum teams will use some kind […]