What is a Daily Scrum? In Scrum, teams have a short meeting, not to exceed 15 minutes, on a daily basis,  where they seek to share knowledge, identify areas where help might be needed or can be given, surface dependencies or risks, and agree on next steps to address anything that might be impeding the...Read More

Agile teams, and their customers, benefit by being able to: 1. minimize the duration and effort required for each code integration; and 2. enable the delivery of a version suitable for release at any moment. To achieve these twin objectives, Continuous Integration (CI) relies on a suite of automated tests, where execution can complete rapidly,...Read More

It is beneficial for Agile teams to employ automation to ensure that the state of code and other technical artifacts is healthy, and where deployment of those artifacts is automatically done to one or more target environments. Continuous Deployment implies that there is sufficient infrastructure and instrumentation in place, such that after each successful integration,...Read More

It is helpful for Agile teams to ensure that software is always ready to be deployed. An important aspect of Continuous Delivery is having automated tests in place that provide evidence that any changes that have been made do not cause the software to fail. An additional facet of this capability is having processes in...Read More

Many organizations have a process or mechanism through which changes are introduced, at a systemic (organizational) level, or at a more tactical level, such as changes to a particular product or set of products. Various change management models exist, with different levels of rigor and complexity. In Agile software development, change management is a continuous...Read More

It is important for Agile teams to be able to set expectations for how much work a they can complete, over a particular time horizon. The considerations that teams take into account for capacity planning purposes include: 1) Team size (also factoring in any expected lack of availability for one or more team members); 2....Read More

In a general Agile team context, there is a limit to how much work that a team can complete during a given time interval, based on evaluation of the past history of that team, along with other data, as available. In Scrum, the immediate time horizon, for planning purposes, is an iteration (Sprint). In Kanban,...Read More

On Agile teams, it is common for events or activities to happen based on a regular, predictable rhythm. In software development, one of the most common manifestations of a cadence is the Scrum notion of running consecutive iterations (Sprints) that last for a consistent amount of time (two weeks, for example). Another example of a...Read More

When a software project is thought to be behind schedule, a common assumption is that adding more people to the team(s) will yield the desired improvement in terms of bringing in the project completion date. What occurs immediately after adding new people is that the completion of work tends to be slower for a period...Read More

Agile teams periodically revisit their list of work to be done, which in Scrum they refer to as their Product Backlog. Many teams use the term Backlog Refinement to describe their process for making Product Backlog Items ready for team members to work on. For instance, many Scrum teams have a Backlog Refinement conversation at...Read More