ZenTao

  In one of my recent assignments, I was working with a Scrum Team on a new development project for a large organisation. The conditions were challenging: there were 10+ Scrum Teams working on an entirely new product, and half of those teams (our team included) had started less than a year ago. Meanwhile, the organisation was in full swing adopting an agile way of working based on the Scrum framework. For me as Scrum Master, this was a great opportunity to help out supporting the team, the Product Owner and the organization in delivering value to their customers. The case The pressure on the project was intense on all levels. Management was looking for status information to steer on. Instead of working with the teams and getting involved with their work, they helped themselves to the readily availa...

 There are so many using agile methodology indeed for now, and for those very big companies, they do it in Agile together with their own ideas, and what’s more, is that developing a management platform online or offline. What I would like to introduce is that our own company is using it as the methodology, and do practices based on Scrum. And what’s funnier is that our main product ZenTao - An Application Lifecycle Management tool which we use ourselves to do collaborations. First of all, I need to introduce our team. We are a software developing company locates in Qingdao, China and there are about 70 employees for now. It’s not a small team indeed, but we implement agile quite handy. We did restructure our organization based on Ameba which was very first proposed by INAMORI KAZUO from KYOCERA about 6 years ago. Ameba focuses more on organizational structure in an Agile way and now it has been very popular i...

The Scrum Framework was developed by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland in the 1990s and first formalized in 1995 to address the inherent complexity of product and software development. More recently, the Scrum Framework is being applied successfully to complex problems in a wide variety of domains, like marketing, organizational change, and scientific research. The Scrum Framework is built on three pillars that allow empirical control: Transparency: you gather data — like metrics, feedback on the product, and other experiences — to find out what is going on; Inspection: you inspect the progress with everyone involved and decide what that means for your ambitions and work together; Adaptation: you make changes that you hope will bring you closer to your ambitions; This cycle repeats as frequently as necessary to catch d...

It’s such a simple question that you can’t help but wonder why we’re even asking it. The Scrum Framework relies heavily on involving stakeholders. And for good reason. You need them to validate your assumptions and to determine what is valuable (and what isn’t). “There is a big difference between a stakeholder and someone with an opinion about the product” Its a simple question. Still, many Scrum Teams and organizations struggle with it. We’ve visited Sprint Reviews where all the ‘stakeholders’ present were internal to the organization; people from marketing and sales, an internal product manager and an opinionated colleague. None of them were either using or paying for the product and its development. We’ve found that not including the right stakeholders is one of the primary causes of Zombie Scrum. This post is all about what makes a real stakeholder. And more importantly, how to find them. The users and customers are often very distant from the developers. Illustration by Thea Schuk...

Few teams start from a position where the Scrum Framework works like a charm from the start. Scrum is radically different from the way that teams have built products and worked with stakeholders in the past. Scrum Teams usually need to improve in many different areas, and overcome many barriers, in order to reach their goals of higher customer satisfaction. Because every team, every challenge, and every context is unique, it doesn’t suffice to simply copy “best practices” from elsewhere and expect them to work. Instead, they need to experiment with different approaches to find what works best for them. Unfortunately, we’ve found that many Scrum Teams struggle to improve at all. And that easily leads to Zombie Scrum: something that may look like Scrum from a distance but lacks the beating heart. In this post, we address one common reason for this: a lack of tangible improvements. Signs to watch for The Sprint Retrospective doesn’t result in any improvements at all. For the actions that ...

  Self-hosted, light, affordable, scrum tool, agile tool ZenTao Freemium     Windows   Linux   Web   Android   Self-Hosted   Website  ZenTao is an open source project management tool, supporting Scrum. It integrates product management, project management, bug management and QA management, etc., covering all lifecycle of software development. Restyaboard Freemium     Linux   Web   Self-Hosted   Website  Open source Trello-like kanban board. Based on Restya platform. Kanboard Free     Web   Self-Hosted   Cloudron   Website  Kanboard is a simple visual task board software. Kanboard is a free and open source Kanban project management software. There is no fancy user interface, Kanboard focus on simplicity and minimalism. The number of features is voluntary limited. Visualize your work Limit your work in progress to focus on your goal Drag and drop tasks to manage your project Self-hosted...

What is Scope Creep? Simply put, scope creep is when a project's requirements, goals, and vision changes go overwhleming what was originally agreed upon.While it comes up, the project will not be clearly defined anymore, even the reponsiblities becomes uncertain. It might be just sligt things added again and again, and you will just realize there are so more items you need to complete.                                                                       source Scope creep can be caused by: poor user story change control without further review lack of proper initial identification of what is required to bring about the project objectives project manager or executive sponsor not capable or strong enough lack of communications between multiple parties initial product versatility shortage How can you prevent scope cre...