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Guest blog: Many Faces of Jack Sparrow - Agile Retrospective. Can Agile Work If Some Of My Development is Outsourced? I’m asked this question by folks quite often, and the short answer is yes.

Can Agile Work If Some Of My Development is Outsourced?

There are a few key things to consider though, before challenging your agile efforts with an outsourced component. First, is your organization already competent at agile software development and agile project management? If not, outsourcing a component of your efforts will only make this more challenging. Why? Because agile approaches require a high degree of open communication, collaboration and trust between the business, customers and development. What if you’re just starting out with agile and you currently have outsourced components? So assuming that we must work with an outsourced component of our product development, what can we do to help ensure success? Vendor Evaluation Traditional vendor evaluation has us focusing on vendor process certifications, size, and rates. ProductivitySystem qualityFlexibilityCollaboration level. What is STLC V-Model? What is STLC V-Model?

What is STLC V-Model?

One of the major handicaps of waterfall STLC model was that, defects were found at a very later state of the development process, since testing was done at the end of the development cycle. It became very challenging and costly to fix the defects since it were found at a very later stage. To overcome this problem, a new development model was introduced called the “V Model” V model is now one of the most widely used software development process. Introduction of V model has actually proved the implementation of testing right from the requirement phase. To understand the V model, let’s first understand what is verification and validation in software. Verification: Verification is a static analysis technique. Validation: Validation is a dynamic analysis technique where testing is done by executing the code. In V model, the development and QA activities are done simultaneously. Left Hand side: As said earlier, left hand side activities are the development activities.

Resources. Updates to the Scrum Guide – The 5 Scrum values take center stage - Scrum.org Community Blog. Today Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, the creators of Scrum delivered a webinar on their latest update to the Scrum Guide.

Updates to the Scrum Guide – The 5 Scrum values take center stage - Scrum.org Community Blog

The update was a simple one, adding the 5 values of Scrum to the Guide. And when I say simple I mean simple in terms of the text changes to the Scrum Guide, not simple in terms of what it means to the community and people practicing Scrum. In fact, far from it. By making the Scrum values explicit and transparent it may call your teams working approach into question.

But ultimately these values provide value (pun intended). When Should We Estimate the Product Backlog. I was recently emailed a question asking whether the sprint planning meeting should start with time allocated for putting story point estimates on any user stories that have not yet been estimated.

When Should We Estimate the Product Backlog

No, I don't think this is a good idea. Keep in mind that we put estimates on product backlog items (which I recommend be user stories) so that: the product backlog can be prioritized. The Scrum Product Backlog - International Scrum Institute. In the simplest definition the Scrum Product Backlog is simply a list of all things that needs to be done within the project.

The Scrum Product Backlog - International Scrum Institute

It replaces the traditional requirements specification artifacts. These items can have a technical nature or can be user-centric e.g. in the form of user stories. The owner of the Scrum Product Backlog is the Scrum Product Owner. Product Owner Team INVEST Criteria -LeadingAgile. In most organizations, the knowledge necessary to break down user stories in this manner is not contained within a single individual.

Product Owner Team INVEST Criteria -LeadingAgile

With more complex products, there is usually a team of people required, some of which, may or may not be assigned directly to the team. At scale, quite often we are dealing with business and architecturally significant dependencies, which must be managed across teams. Product Backlog Item (PBI) Product Backlog Items can range from specifications and requirements, to use cases, epics, User Stories, or even bugs and chores.

Product Backlog Item (PBI)

Each PBI must have these qualities: Impediments - Scrum Inc. Most Impediments are a form of Waste and can be identified by understanding waste in all its forms.

Impediments - Scrum Inc

The slides have a list of common Impediments Teams often run into. The Scrum Master’s main responsibility is to identify, track and help remove impediments. Often, team members remove their own impediments. Sometimes, Impediments are beyond the ability of the Team to remove. Story Points Versus Task Hours. "Cheng, this is just a three-point story.

Story Points Versus Task Hours

We shouldn't take more than 30 hours to do this," one of the developers told me during the sprint planning. And a development manager once advised me, "Cheng, you must not pull in any other stories, because we already committed 30 points' worth of stories and our velocity is just 28 story points! " User Stories, Epics and Themes. I've been getting more and more emails lately from people confused about the difference between “user stories”, “epics” and “themes.”

User Stories, Epics and Themes

So I thought this month we'd return and cover some basic–but very helpful–territory by explaining those terms. First, the terms don't matter that much. These are not terms with important specific meanings like “pointer” to a programmer or “collateralized debt obligation” to whomever it is that's important. DSDM Consortium. 13.1 Introduction. Agile Contracts: Creating and Managing Successful Projects with Scrum - Andreas Opelt, Boris Gloger, Wolfgang Pfarl, et al. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Agile Fixed-Price Contracts. The good -- Most Agile projects are fixed price per iteration, by nature. You have a fixed team (Sscrum team) to deliver some feature (sprint backlog) within a fixed time (sprint).

The bad -- Usually when people say "fixed price," they mean fixing all parameters, i.e., price, time, and scope. Who are the Pigs and Chickens. Scrum is an iterative framework to help teams manage and progress through a complex project. It is most commonly used in Software Development by teams that implement the Agile Software Development methodology. However it is not limited to those groups. Even if your team does not implement Agile Software Development, you cans till benefit from holding regular scrums with your teams. Product roadmaps and timelines for Powerpoint – My Product Roadmap. Velocity. What is Definition of Done (DoD)? Definition of done is crucial to a highly functioning Scrum team. Definition of DONE! 10 Point Checklist. A key principle of agile software development is “done means DONE!” INVEST (mnemonic) One of the characteristics of Agile Methodologies such as Scrum or XP is the ability to move stories around, taking into account their relative priority - for example - without much effort.