Both are junior members of staff without much prior experience. Mario is taking on his first role as a Product Owner and Julia is a Developer. How are they both supported and trained when they join their agile squad? Julia joins a team of experienced developers, and she can spend…

As a Product Owner its tempting to try and capture as much detail as possible on a user story. I might start with a simple requirement, but then end up adding loads of additional information! Of course, we all know that a user story, at its essence is just meant…

In an ideal world, there should be one Product Owner for one agile development team or squad. Or at a stretch, maybe one Product Owner for two teams, if they’re working on the same backlog. At the moment, I’m not in that ideal world. My current project has five squads…

The Scrum Master for my team left for a new role at the end of August, and since then we’ve been without a dedicated Scrum Master. My role is that of the Product Owner, but in the past I’ve covered some of the duties of the Scrum Master (keeping the…

I like that we have a Definition of Ready for our stories. As a Product Owner it gives me confidence that I’ve done my job properly in analysing and communicating the requirements, and also that the team is ready to hit the ground running when the sprint starts. Lately, however…

The whole subject of measuring performance of agile teams is a divisive one. In an ideal world we should be looking to measure the value delivered by a team, rather than collecting performance statistics. After all, our primary goal in agile is to deliver some value to the product or…

How often does your sprint goal or stories change in the middle of the sprint? A late-breaking requirement or bug comes in, or a manager pops up with an urgent task, and before you know it your sprint is totally overloaded. Does that sound familiar? Teams often think they’re being…

Have you even been to sprint planning and realised that the so-called stories are a bunch of crap? One-line JIRA tickets that the team haven’t seen before? Then you need to enforce a Definition of Ready. We can be good about tracking the progress of stories once they’ve been added…

In the olden days of waterfall development, you had teams of Business Analysts that all sat together. …