Features vs. user stories in Scrum
As Scrum has grown in popularity, the concept of user stories has made its way from theory and dust covered UML books, to developers every-day vocabulary. In the "old days" we tended to focus on one layer at a time, instead of one user story at a time, we focused on writing large classes supposed to solve all possible scenarios for later re-use instead of simple YAGNI focused classes pin-pointing its purpose and we focused on large-upfront design instead of gradually adapting to the maturity obtained by the customer (and developers) through the project.
We started out with allot of user-stories and even more good intentions, but ended up with phase 2 and 3 and a bunch of long forgotten concepts and diagrams. Today we are not better at planning one year ahead; we have just realized that this is almost impossible. We started focusing on business value which closely relates to user-stories. We started working with user stories weekly and we started estimating and prioritizing user stories in our Product Backlogs.
Daily Stand-Ups in Scrum
I just came across a great summary of the daily stand-ups in scrum, written by Joakim Karlsson. I guess most Scrum teams start out with good intentions and focus in the begging, but as time goes by, we start falling into the old "around the table" reporting habit to the project manager, the Scrum master becomes more and more a project manager, and we gradually drift away from the core principles and ideas behind the daily stand-up!
Struggling with impedance mismatch, obstacles and technical debt in Scrum projects
Lean processes such as Scrum has no requirements regarding specific software design methodology, but on the other hand an agile software process requires an agile code base!
Focus on the product backlog and business value of Scrum projects
While struggeling on a customer project, I came across a post in Eric Lee's blog The root of all evil in Scrum
We are struggeling on a customer project to get scrum working. I joined the team a couple of months back, when they had allready been scrumming for a while, but I found a SCRUM team in a big crises, where they were scrumming, but as I asked them, why?
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