Why You Shouldn’t Assign Team Members to User Stories During Sprint Planning
The Agile Compass by Matthias Orgler Hello Reader, last week we talked about why we can’t seem to let go of “finalizing the plan”. This week we’ll loo...
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Agile Compass
A growing collection of articles on agility, innovation, leadership, and product management. Practical insights to help you navigate change and build high-performing teams.
Filtered by tag: Scrum — Clear
How to Boost Team Collaboration with User Stories – Not Just Writing!
Let’s Chat About Writing User Stories… Or Not Alright, do you measure the effectiveness of product owners by how much time they devote to writing great user stories? Many do...
? Stop arguing over frameworks and methodologies!
These are NOT what makes you agile. ? The grass is always greener on the other side. Debating whether scrum or kanban or something else is better will not get you anywhere...
How long is your backlog?
If you start having trouble finding stories – or wondering whether the story is already in there somewhere – your backlog is probably too long ? The idea of a product back...
A sprint review or system demo without stakeholders is useless.
How many times have you seen sprint reviews without stakeholders? I must admit, I have seen this far too often in my life. And it’s a waste of time! Why is it useless? ...
The simple 7-step guide for awesome Retrospectives ?
Retrospectives often end up as “letting off steam” or “endlessly discussing problems” events. That’s not helpful. Retros should help a team continuously improve! They should ...
Without a goal, Sprint Plannings are wasted time ?
Sprints need a goal! Just handing out unconnected stories to developers is NOT agile. Product Owners are not only responsible to create and have a product vision, they’re ...
Almost done – how to ruin your agility with unfinished user stories at the end of a sprint in Scrum!
What to do with an almost finished story at the end of the sprint? Finish it? Carry it over? Put it back? Count 90% of the story points? 100%? 0%? We cannot predict the fu...
Scrum vs Kanban
Don‘t fret too much over the right agile framework for your company. Focus on an agile culture instead. Establishing an agile culture is the key to success. Without it, ...
Is Scrum a too rigid framework?
Countless teams have moaned over Scrum being too rigid and not really suited for their particular domain. As an agile coach responsible for countless agile transitions I stro...
"We tried Scrum and it didn't work"
I hear this statement a lot recently. Companies claiming they tried to do Scrum, but even after a year or more it didn’t work for them. I disagree – let me tell you why. S...
Understand Sprint Burn-Down Patterns
A Scrum team can learn a lot form sprint burn-down charts. I want to help you recognize typical patterns, understand what causes problems and how to resolve these issues. For...
What is a Sprint Burn-Down Chart?
The burn-down chart is a tool in the agile Scrum framework to unearth inefficiencies in a team and improve towards greater agility. In an agile team or organization you shoul...
Scrum will not make you agile!
Or: Would you trust a Geiger counter to save your life? Disclaimer: I love Scrum — it’s an awesome framework! But too many people believe that Scrum would make their company ...
How to split a user story between two teams?
Do you have user stories that need the expertise of more than one team? How do you organize this? The situation Your specific situation might be slightly different, but...