AGILE IN ACTION

It's essential to make the progress made during a sprint or iteration visible to the team and to the product owner or on-site customer. This can be achieved with big visible charts. I consider the minimum charts to be a burn-up or burn-down chart and a chart showing the acceptance tests passing or failing.

Agile projects demand real customer involvement. To be an effective on-site customer or Product Owner, you must either be a real customer, or be in a position to accurately represent the real customer. You must acknowledge the elevated status you hold and accept the responsibilities that accompany it (accepted responsibility). You must be a stakeholder and a fully integrated member of the team. You must be accessible and you must participate in the project proactively and continuously. You must recognize that through your actions - writing user stories and acceptance tests, prioritizing user stories by business value, deciding which user stories are developed next, providing rapid feedback, etc - you are effectively steering the project and are ultimately responsible for the business value that is delivered. As the driving force behind the project your presence must be visible, vocal and objective.

Here's an article on Scrum that I originally read in the FT - Rapid results without a rugby scrum.

A few people I've spoken with recently said that agile planning tools do not really fit into an informative workspace because the information they contain is not directly visible to passers-by. They have a point.

Designing the layout

Promiscuous Pairing

Ken Schwaber talks about Scrum at the SDForum Agile Summit in 2004 - You thought it was easy: Wrestling gold from today's software projects.

The presentation was recorded at the Developer Testing Forum in 2004. Kent talks about how the developer tests produced by test-driven development directly contribute to the health of software, and how they can give a developer a sense of accountability without apportioning blame.