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It was at the Spring Scrum Gathering 2008 Chicago that Tobias Mayer did an Open Space session on simulations to help get Agile ideas across to people, in a way that brings them to life.  One that was new for me at the time was the ball game, originally blogged about by Boris Gloger. I have been using this simulation regularly on my Agile ...

Now that Visual Studio Team System 2010 Beta 1 and Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 1 are available on MSDN Subscriber Downloads, we’d like to announce our broad plans for Scrum for Team System. The next release of Scrum for Team System will be v3.0 and like the prior releases our aim is to ship as soon as possible after release of Team ...

I was recently catching up with an old friend from school; he was interested in Scrum, as he had started to get requests for proposals that specifically asked for Agile.  We were on a Stag do at the point of the initial conversation, so I probably didn’t articulate what Scrum was that well, and even if I did my friend was in no position to ...

A few support queries and tweets have come up recently about our support for 64-bit Sharepoint (WSS or MOSS) with Scrum for Team System v2.2 and TFS.  The crux of the issue seems to be the ability of the installer to detect the location of WSS as it is not looking in the correct place in the registry to support both 32 and 64-bit installers, ...

For the Scrum for Team System project I have been focusing on the reports; I came across an issue which was due to the way the Reporting Services 2008 "automatic upgrade" feature upgraded our reports. The Scrum for Team System template contains over 20 reports all written for Reporting Services 2005. This was done because Team ...

As part of work recently to improve how we test the Scrum for Team System template and tools across different platforms, we have discovered there are a few additional manual steps to take when you are installing the template in a distributed environment (i.e. you are using a remote WSS 3 or MOSS 2007 server to host your Team Project Portals). ...

Scrum for Team System version 2.2 was recently released. The most significant new project management report is the Velocity Report.   The velocity report tracks the historical "burn rate" for a team in such a manner to allow for truly accurate release planning. Throughout this post I'll use the term "Story Points" as ...

Lots of work has been done to understand the role of the ScrumMaster, there has been far less written and said about the role of the Product Owner.  Who is this person who is responsible for the ROI of the project?  I have tried to create a number of statements that balance the characteristics of the Product Owner. Characteristics of a ...

IT projects failures are unfortunately not uncommon.   We hear stories of projects that never deliver, projects that are either late or well over cost.  One of the main reasons identified for this is Scope being out of control. In waterfall projects all the scope is identified at beginning of the project, when we engage with our ...

I'm presenting at the Scrum Gathering today, in the Session I will be covering Scaling the Product Owner, Shaping the Product Backlog and Well Formed Backlog Items in more detail.  To my knowledge the Scrum Alliance aren't collecting feedback, so if you were at the session please leave feedback here, and sign up for updates.  I will ...