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THE SPRINT IS ACTUALLY A SET OF GOALS
People with goals always outperform people without them. I think that this is the main reason to begin setting goals. We all work better if we have a goal. That is, goals that we commit to, make a promise to ourselves that we will finish. A goal without this is not a goal, it is just a waste of time. What’s the point if I set a goal for myself and then just ignore it? We have to hold ourselves accountable. Now, the goals has to be reasonable, you have to be able to finish them, or they are just as useless as not having any. Setting a goal to…
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THE REFINEMENT IS NOT JUST AN HOUR LONG MEETING EVERY SPRINT
User Story Refinement – The activity of understanding what is asked of us, and the decision making of how to do it. There refinement has two parts. The first part is to make sure that we understand what the stakeholders want. What are the problem we’re trying to solve? We have to understand how the story fits into the big picture, we have to understand how the thing we are going to do is going to be used by the stakeholders. Not the stakeholder (singular), because there are of course many stakeholders. Obviously, there is the client. The one we talked to when the story saw the light of day…
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SCRUM – THE BIG MOTIVATOR
When we read about motivation and what makes an organization effective, we often find that the control over one’s work and time is at the very top. We see this in for instance 3Ms 15% rule. Or for that matter, flex-time has the same goal. I even think I heard about a company that had no required work hours at all. Or how about having the possibility to not have to work at the office? This is also one of the big reasons when people start their own business. To take control over their own time. It is not hard to see that if you choose to do something you…
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TASK ESTIMATES AND THE BURN DOWN CHART, WHY AND HOW
The article in short The burn down chart is a tool for the team to detect problems early in the sprint.It works as the canary in the mines from the old days.Time estimates in tasks are part of the burn down chart. In the olden days, you had to wait until the end of a project to know if you were finished in time or not (and you never were). And a project that lasted more than a year is not uncommon. That is a long time of uncertainty. Thankfully, we now work agile. Nowadays we have sprints, and they are typically two to three weeks long. Which then means…