With hundreds of different Agile software development practices, there are few that are completely useless — surprisingly though, they are still very popular among many organizations and Scrum Teams. — Here is my list of top 5 time-wasting and useless Agile Practices: 1. Estimating User Stories in Story Points backwards. The only reason of estimating in Story Points is to check if the team have a similar understanding of what and how needs to be done to finish the User Story. Estimating any work backwards is counter-productive and doesn’t bring any value: What is the point of checking if we…

12 practical tips for having more effective Daily Scrums. — Even, if you don’t practice Scrum in your Team, probably you still follow the habit of having daily, short meetings during which all your team-members discuss together the plan of work for the next 24hrs. …

7 tips how to effectively recruit and hire people to your team. — During discussions about high-performing teams, we’re talking a lot of about coaching, mentoring, external trainings or facilitating workshops, but still forgetting about the other activity that can save companies a lot of time and money invested in building teams if it’s done right — RECRUITMENT. “Acquiring the right talent is…

How to Properly Measure and Use the Velocity? — Team’s Velocity is one the main metric used by Scrum Teams to plan their work and forecast potential future deliverables. Unfortunately, quite often the metric is being over-used and treated by stakeholders as the main method to manage business commitments and make long-term plans — such way of using Velocity…

Why IT project work plans fail and yet still we all continue to play the game that we cannot win. — Almost each IT Project looks the same, we first organize planning sessions, build Gantts Charts and Project Plans, create Risks Log, analyse requirements, provide estimations, add time buffers for unexpected events, communicate the timeline to the stakeholders and then… after few weeks everything is starting to fail. Team gets irritated…

Few tips for Product Managers, Scrum Masters and Managers when going through tough times. — Sometimes, things don’t go our way — product is getting bad reviews, our stakeholders are not satisfied with the financial results and people in the team are leaving. In this kind of moments, it’s may be worth to stop and go back to basics of product and team management. Those…

How to write good User Stories and apply them in a proper way? — User Stories have become a standard way for software development teams to capture business requirements and build Product Backlogs. …

Evidence Based Framework as a strategic tool for Product Lifecycle Management. — Software Products gives us the unique opportunity to see exactly how customers use our Product. By tracking thousands of metrics like Visits, Lead Time, Bounce Rate, Reading Time and other we’re able to gather almost a complete picture of the potential user of our system. ‘You can’t manage what you…

Take your Product Owner skills to the next level. — Sometime ago, I published the article ‘Top 13 Tips to Become a Great Product Owner’, and so far it was the most popular blog post on my Medium account — it got more than 20k visits. Today, (4 years older) I gathered the next set of advice for Product Owners who already had a chance to be in the role for a couple of years. If you’re new to the role of Product Owner, I’d strongly recommend to first read the below blog post, as it focuses on the basics of Product Ownership.