Danube Scrum and Agile Blog

Ahh, the Daily Scrum Meeting…  Everybody who knows Scrum knows the three questions:

What have you done since the last Daily Meeting?
What are you going to do until the next Daily Meeting? and
What impediments are standing in your way?

Many people are confused, and think that the [...]

There has been a lot of talk about the Project Manager in Scrum. Two of the more popular statements have been:

Scrum projects have no Project Manager, and
the ScrumMaster is the “Agile Project Manager”

I believe that both of these statements are wrong.

I’ve been using and studying Scrum ever since I heard about it from Linda Rising 12 or so years ago. At its core, Scrum is a pattern language and it’s been evolving as people find better ways of doing things, and the patterns have changed. This post will give a very quick overview of what [...]

A few years (about 6-7, I think), I introduced the term “done/done/done” into agility in order to describe what “done” meant in an agile setting. It is now pretty established the “done” is a HUGE concept in Scrum, but at the time we were just figuring it out. My thinking at the time was that [...]

I’d like to rant a little bit on something that I find prevalent in the teams that I coach and in the classes that I teach. When I talk to people about Scrum (and agility in general), I invariably hear things like, “I’d like my teams to be more efficient”; “We’re using Scrum so [...]

There has been a lot of talk lately about the Product Owner and people are getting quite heated about it. Here’s my take on it.
The Product Owner is the person (not role, person) who is held accountable for the success of the team. He or she is the boss, commander, one throat to choke, MFIC, [...]

Imagine our Product Owner says: “I want this feature by tomorrow and I don’t care if you’ve got to hack it in. If we don’t deliver it tomorrow, it will cost us millions of dollars!!” What do we do?
That’s a rhetorical question, I hope. Of course, we just hack it in. You intentionally create technical [...]

Imagine you are at the Sprint Review and the Sales Manager says, “That looks good! I can sell the heck out of that. Ship that puppy!” Now what? What do you need to do to get the system shipped, and how and when will you do it?
First of all, what does the Sales Manager mean [...]

So, since we are astute enough so that we’re not expecting a story’s size (In Story Points) to be an accurate reflection of the effort it takes for the story – even though we expect a correlation on average – what is our expectation of what a story’s size reflects? This is a very good [...]

One of the questions that we get all the time is “why can’t you estimate better?” This is a good question, but it’s actually a trick question – and not the right question. What the questioner really wants to know is “why didn’t your actual effort match your estimate?” Now, this is a very good [...]