Summary Motley: A successful development iteration does not need a goal. Just deliver some features and call it good. Maven: A goal provides clarification on what the team is building during a development iteration. Goals provide rallying points for...

Summary Motley: An effective modification to Scrum is to do a requirements sprint, followed by a design sprint, implementation sprint, test sprint, and stabilization sprint. It has the benefits of Scrum and has commonality with our older processes, which makes the developers happier...

Summary Motley: Use Scrum in my personal relationships? Don't be such a geek. Maven: You can apply the same lessons as Scrum teaches to your personal relationships - lots of communication, planning, iteration, and retrospectives focusing on continuous improvement. Just translate the really...

Summary Motley: Bug fix sprints are a Scrum anti-pattern. Quality should be kept high so as not to have to focus on bug fixing. Maven: A clear meaning of done for sprint tasks is important, but even if you follow this best practice, there will always be integration issues, bugs, and changes...

Summary Motley: A burndown chart? What are we burning down? Your house? Maven: Track time remaining for tasks to generate a burndown. Combine time remaining with time spent to generate a cumulative flow diagram with burndown. Use the charts to get an accurate picture of project progress....

Summary Motley: Reflection is for mirrors. We just finished a sprint. Why open up old wounds? Maven: At the end of a sprint, do a demo for stakeholders, customers, and the team. Do a retrospective to reflect on what went well and what requires improvement. Continually improve the team from...

Summary Motley: We don't need the daily meeting. Very few people got any value out of them, and attendance started to wane near the end. Maven: An effective daily stand-up involves < 9 people, all team members, everyone attends, and the conversation focuses on answering several directed...

Summary Motley: We tried Scrum, and it sucks. The team hated it. Maven: Apply Scrum patterns and avoid the antipatterns. Some Scrum best practices include including the Product Owner in product backlog creation, including the team in planning, using Planning Poker to estimate tasks, having...

Summary Motley: Scrum? Does that mean team members have to carry a ball and tackle each other in the hallway? Maven: Scrum is an agile project management methodology that follows agile principles. The process is build a product backlog, plan the sprint, execute and meet daily, demo the work...