Add Expiration Dates to Your Backlog Items If you have a backlog that’s getting out of control, consider using expiration dates to help control the list and streamline your team’s priorities. Many mature agile teams or scrum teams that have been together for a while might find themselves with a backlog that’s hundreds if not […]
Use Working Agreements for your Daily Scrum Have you ever considered that working agreements for your daily scrum might make them a lot more valuable, and help separate the daily scrum from any other meetings you have each day? Your team’s daily scrum or daily stand up might be one of the most important meetings […]
A Wishlist of Ready! Many Agile and Scrum teams have adopted the practice of having a “Definition of Ready” as a way to explicitly define when a Story – or Backlog Item – is “Ready” for a team to take into a Sprint. This often serves as an entrance gate for Stories and ideas to […]
Explicit Sprint Learning Goals On this edition of Agile Quick Tips, we’re going to be discussing how setting explicit sprint learning goals could help improve your team overall. Agile teams or scrum teams will often set goals during sprint planning that help them to maximize value and optimize the product that sprint. But what if […]
Achievement Focused Daily Scrum If you’re feeling like your daily Scrum or Stand-up is getting less valuable, and losing some of its effectiveness, why not turn things around by changing the focus to achievements rather than activities? Most Agile team’s Stand-ups or Scrums focus pretty heavily on activities. Questions asked in the daily Scrum include […]
The Open Meeting Parking Lot Meetings getting off track? Have you thought about using the idea of an Open Meeting Parking Lot to make an entire meeting more focused? Many Agile teams complain about meetings that get derailed. This can be anything from a daily Scrum that takes much longer than ideal because everyone has […]
Implicit Task Estimates Instead of Explicit Ones by Giora Morein You’re about to learn how changing your task estimates from explicit to implicit could make all the difference to the productivity and experience of your Scrum teams. Sprint planning is where most Scrum or Agile teams will take a story or a different backlog item […]
Vegas-Style Retrospective by Giora Morein Vegas-style retrospective might really be the difference-maker in helping your team identify and exploit those improvement opportunities that can propel them through the stratosphere. What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas! This famous tag line might not immediately sound like it has much to do with agile learning or Scrum […]
Using a Shared Daily Goal to make Your Sprint more Valuable The idea of a ‘Shared Daily Goal’ is really simple, and by using this tactic at the end of every scrum, you might see a huge impact on how valuable your daily scrum meetings are. The daily scrum or daily stand-up is all about […]
Begin and End Your Sprint in the Middle of the Day My latest Agile QuickTip is all about how ending and starting your sprints in the middle of the day might make your team way more effective. Most scrum teams will end their sprints at the end of the day, and then start the next […]