You already know that roles are crucial to any User Story since they help us put context around who a given feature is for. However, did you know that you can also put context around your roles?

It’s no secret that teams who track their progress using physical tools rather than electronic have have a much higher rate of success, but how do you handle of the fear of sticky notes falling off the wall?

When a new team is just beginning to adopt Scrum the difference between stories, themes, and epics always seem to be a source of some confusion. In particular, where stories end and epics begin tends to be a particular sticking point. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at each artifact to get a better understanding of the subtle differences between them so we can better communicate to our teams when each is appropriate for the work at hand.

Velocity usually isn't the best measure of a team's progress. Instead, we often find accuracy to be a better indicator of a team's long term success. Since many teams still find value in having a metric with which they can plot their success, why not use one that measures how accurate they're becoming?

Teams that post consistently high velocities are often treated as valuable to the organization. However, those teams that tend to be more erratic...posting a high velocity one sprint then falling off dramatically the next...may not be as valuable as they may first appear.

While the tagline Zappos abolishes Managers has gotten great press, in actuality it's a bit of an over-simplification of what's happening.

Recently our team introduced Flyway for automating schema changes to our database. Along the way, we learned a few interesting lessons about using a schema migration tool in a team heavily bought into a distributed version control.

We've all seen the movies and read the stories, a group of outsiders create something completely under the radar that when unleashed on the world becomes the next runaway success. It's sexy, it's exciting, and it's inspirational to millions of young entrepreneurs. However, there's one problem: it rarely happens that way.

Did you know that payroll is usually the biggest expenditure of any software company? If you do, then it should come as no surprise that many companies tout the line ‘people are our greatest asset’. However, it can be scary just how little thought those same companies put into hiring the right people for their teams.

If you want to ship your product then you have to set a deadline.