Tag Archives: Scrum

A Practical Guide to Distributed Scrum

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I have received my copy of the recently published “A Practical Guide to Distributed Scrum”. The book covers much of what I have already experienced in my role as an IT architect for 4 Scrum teams consisting of developers from Denmark, Lithuania, Belarus and India. So I look forward to read through the practical suggestions in the book to see if our teams can improve – and to see if I have other practical advices and lessons learned to add.

These are some of topics in the book that I find interesting:

  • distributed teams
  • backlog and release plans
  • preparing for sprint planning
  • the actual sprint planning
  • continuous integration
  • test automation

The book is written by Elizabeth Woodward, Steffan Surdek, and Matthew Ganis. The book is available at Amazon: A Practical Guide to Distributed Scrum.

Update July 18: As commented by Matthew Ganis: 100% of the proceeds go to charity (Children’s Hunger Fund and the Alzheimer’s Association).

Update August 16: A Facebook page for A Practical Guide to Distributed Scrum is now available – and the web site for A Practical Guide to Distributed Scrum for has been updated.

Webcast: Using Rational Team Concert in a Globally Distributed Team

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Erich Gamma from the Rational Jazz team has just recorded and posted a 60 minute webcast on the subject of using Rational Team Concert in a globally distributed team. Erich covers topics such as server setup, release planning, iteration planning and finishing a release.

Have a look if you are interested in agile methods.

Scott Ambler on agile software development

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I have been listening to a developerWorks podcast with Scott Ambler where he discusses agile development.

Scott has an interesting point when he compares agile adoption with the history of astronomy: the agile community is the equivalent of the people who thought that everything revolved around the sun, while the traditional community is the equivalent of the people who thought everything revolved around the earth. In other words, we have to go through several paradigm shifts before the traditional software development community will understand the thoughts of the agile community.

Scott Ambler is Practice Leader Agile Development with IBM Rational and he has a blog at developerWorks where he blogs about strategies for scaling agile software development.

Rational Team Concert 1.0 is now available

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Rational Team Concert 1.0 is now available on jazz.net. You can download a free version with a server and 3 client licenses included. Team concert “provides a development environment that allows developers to collaborate together using integrated Source Control, Work Items, Build, Dashboards, Reports, and Process support. ”

I am especially interested in the support for agile projects via the iteration planning and work item management feature combined with the collaboration support – and all this in the same package.

I do architect related work for a J2EE project at the moment where agile planning takes place in ScrumWorks, source control is via CVS, code development is via Rational Software Architect, overall project planning is via Rational Portfolio Manager, and remote collaboration is done via Lotus Sametime. From that perspective Rational Team Concert looks very interesting!