Are you a recent adopter of Agile Methodologies or maybe you’ve been a practitioner for a while and wondering why some of the practices don’t make sense all the time? Maybe you’ve developed fatigue over various ceremonies involved in Agile or Scrum environments or are frustrated by an inability to define what valuable functionality will be delivered within a fixed timescale. Fear not, Value-Oriented Incremental Delivery (Void) can help.

Some things have worked really well, some less so. To try and learn how to replicate our product successes as we scale, and teach new people what is working, we’ve been doing a lot of reflecting on how we work. There is one thing we do at Intercom that I believe is a major factor in contributing to our progress so far. This thing, is deeply understanding the problem each project sets out to solve. This sounds obvious, and is something that others say they do too, but we do it a little differently.

In this second and final part of our article on self-selecting teams, you will learn how to get your self-selection event off the ground. We will also provide tips on how to get the most out of it and keep the momentum going afterwards.

The Definition of Done is an agreement between the Scrum team and the product owner on a minimum quality barrier for the product that’s being built. Establishing a minimum quality barrier has much wider implications than just better quality product, although that is one outcome of having a Definition of Done. This article is about the impact of a definition of done on the types of contract that Agile teams work with.

The primary goal of creating a minimum viable product is not to build something, but instead to learn something. For Ries, who was working at a startup consisting almost entirely of engineers, the easiest way to get their product in front of prospective customers was to build and launch an initial version of it. Hence, the minimum viable product, or MVP.

Like the notion of technical debt, the concept of management debt relates to the leadership issues that prevent a successful Agile transformation. This article from Agile transformation expert Sriram Rajagopalan discusses the types of waste that can be eliminated using a Kanban approach and the role of management debt in perpetuating wasteful practices.

How long does it take an organization to reorganize in order to adopt Scrum? Three hours. Really.

This article talks about Good, Bad, and Ugly ways to negotiate, with an eye toward how a project manager might use these in the complex and sometimes confusing "real world."

In outlining the elements that encourage the design of a humane UX practice, we considered current and future states, an academy of learning, values and beliefs, the language that a project team uses, toolkits; soft skills, or human qualities that deserve continuous practice; spaces in which to design and validate solutions, learnings from stories; and well-understood, shared artifacts for members of project teams to use in telling their common story, independent of their role on a project.

Stakeholders are individuals or organizations who stand to gain or lose from the success or failure of a software development project. This article focuses is on internal stakeholders within the organization and the need to prioritize between them to create the good requirements for a successful project. It presents a process for dealing with internal stakeholders and tools to help prioritizing them.