Not a perfect day

  What is agile? Agile is an approach and mindset for working in an environment with agility that learns and adapts rapidly. Different frameworks like Scrum and Kanban have become more common in project development. It advocates dynamic interaction more than traditional flow and documentation. Why do we use agile? I believe the major reason is efficiency and performance. Periodical retrospection and working software are crucial elements in the Agile approach when compared to traditional waterfall project management. Some successful startup stories also motivate others to believe in Agile values. Working software and minimum viable products ( MVPs ) are released to the market rapidly , generating significant revenue. This attracts more enterprises to adopt Agile in the last decade and even makes it a slogan to promote their business. Although some may criticize the strategy and improper implementation, it still creates an obvious trend in the industry , pushing things forward rapidl...

What is sprint retrospective? Retrospective is a sprint event that happened after the sprint review/demo. It gives the team to retrospect the sprint in terms of process, task and think of how to improve and do better. According to scrum guide ,  the purpose of the Sprint Retrospective is to plan ways to increase quality and effectiveness. What do we do in sprint retrospective? There are many suggestions and formats for the sprint retrospective meeting. We can find dozen of resources like miro  that providing templates to the team to carry out the sprint retrospective. We do hope the team to freely express their opinions as a member in the sprint. In my experience, we may start with the rating or emoji sharing to have a quick relaxed way to open our mind first. Sometimes we may try to make it casual, like sharing a fun fact. After that, we may spend time to write notes to think of sprint like "continue/start doing/stop doing".  At the end, we shall share and elaborate a li...

  What is a story point ? There is no clear definition found online about story point, not even in the online scrum guide . Different people and teams have different interpretations of this term.  In general, story point is a method for the team to estimate the complexity and effort to complete the requirement. So the main objective is for estimation for the team to quantify the backlog items. How does the team make use of story points ? In backlog refinement , the scrum team will normally use the Fibonacci sequence (Planning Poker) to evaluate the story and give an initial estimation of the story point based on the experience that counting against the complexity, risk, impact and uncertainty.  It may undergo alignment between members to reach the conclusion of the final story point when there are conflicts or huge variations. If the story point is too large, it becomes a sign to break into small stories in order to have a less complicated or feasible story with les...