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Scrum

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Will Scrum Masters Lose Their Jobs in the Age of AI?!

AI tools like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot do not understand their answers, so Scrum Masters are not at risk of being replaced by AI.
AI can be helpful in streamlining administrative tasks of Scrum Masters, such as facilitation, report generation, and metrics analysis.
Scrum Masters are still essential for human-side work like coaching, mentoring, empathy, and establishing trust.
However, the emergence of AI may lead to smaller Scrum Teams, resulting in less demand for Scrum Master positions in the market.

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Scrum-Master-Toolbox

CTO Series: Bridging Innovation and Strategy as CTO of CrateDB With Sergey Gerasimenko

Sergey Gerasimenko, the CTO of CrateDB, believes that being a servant, cheerleader and strategist creates an environment where innovation thrives.
Product-market fit for developer-centric solutions presents challenges in connecting both top-down decision-makers and bottom-up developer communities.
AI powered tools will soon be felt through the optimization of background processes in everyday tools and databases.
Sergey details CrateDB’s unique approach to strategic planning, inspired by open-source RFCs. Instead of rigid OKRs, they craft stories to clarify priorities and invite feedback from across the organisation.
Product managers and engineering leads play key roles in advocating for priorities and ensuring alignment across teams.
Sergey highlights the importance of competitive intelligence in staying ahead of market trends without reacting impulsively.
There are two common archetypes for CTO roles, the technical expert versus the team builder and cultural leader.
Sergey shares the books that influenced his leadership style including Peopleware by Tom DeMarco, Drive by Daniel Pink, and Good to Great by Jim Collins.
Sergey is leading the charge in real-time analytics and hybrid search. His leadership continues to push the boundaries of tech innovation.

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Hackernoon

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Developers, How Often Do You Start With a 'Why?'

The 'start with why' concept, popularized by Simon Sinek, is a framework for understanding and communicating the purpose of your work.
In software development, understanding the 'why' behind the software goes beyond functional requirements and technical specifications.
Benefits of understanding the 'why' include increased motivation and engagement, improved problem-solving, better communication and collaboration, and increased innovation.
To understand the 'why,' developers can talk to product managers, read customer feedback and reviews, use market research, and think about the potential impact of their software.

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Medium

247

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Dependencies Are Here to Stay: From Challenges to Opportunities

This article offers a framework for managing dependencies in small to mid-sized enterprises or mid-market companies with smaller, agile teams.
The article argues that dependencies aren't necessarily bad and may be essential for cohesive work.
The real challenge is in managing dependencies strategically to prevent over commitment, delays, and burnout.
The framework emphasizes three key strategies for managing dependencies: prioritizing anticipated outcomes, optimizing capacity, and adapting through dynamic reprioritization.
All requests should be prioritized using a unified framework that focuses on anticipated outcomes rather than ownership or urgency.
Teams should assess whether to pause or defer work if a higher-priority request arises.
Dynamic reprioritization ensures teams can adapt when priorities change.
Dependencies aren’t going away, so it's essential to create a transparent system that reduces burnout and aligns teams with purpose-driven outcomes.

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Medium

269

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Making the Flow of Work Visible with Cumulative Flow Diagrams

A Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD) shows the cumulative amount of work items in various stages of a workflow over time.
A CFD gives a full picture of workflow health and process stability, in contrast to burn-up or burn-down charts, which only track progress.
You can create a CFD by tracking the cumulative items in each stage of your workflow at the same time every day, and charting that data on a stacked area graph.
Most work tracking tools will automatically generate a CFD for you.
It is ideal to track each of your major stages and any wait states they think might happen, to get clarity on processes.
A CFD provides insights into productivity, identifying bottlenecks, and assessing process stability.
It shows how much work has progressed over time, and how much is yet to be done, like a classic burn up chart.
CFDs demonstrate lead time (the time taken for story delivery) and cycle time (time taken for work items to move from one stage to another).
CFDs also allow us to see scope changes, whether they be increases or decreases.
A CFD can help identify flow issues and bottlenecks; it shows us where to look more deeply, to resolve the issue by adding additional approvers or setting a clear SLA on approvals.

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Medium

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Agile for Waterfall Projects: Transforming Your Approach with Scrumban

Scrumban effectively addresses the challenges of transforming waterfall projects into agile workflows
Scrum limitations make it less suitable for long-term waterfall-like projects with evolving requirements
Scrumban combines iterative and incremental delivery of Scrum with the flow-based focus of Kanban
By adopting Scrumban, teams can embrace adaptability while maintaining predictability in waterfall projects

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Alvinashcraft

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Image Credit: Alvinashcraft

Dew Drop – January 10, 2025 (#4339)

The January 2025 release of the Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio Code is available, featuring several updates to improve the developer experience when building Teams apps.
A comprehensive guide on how to run Windows on an Apple Silicon Mac with VMware Fusion Pro is available on the official VMware blog. The process involves downloading and installing the required software, creating a virtual machine, and installing Windows onto that machine.
The Modern .NET Show released a new episode featuring Jim Bennett, a developer at Microsoft, discussing Pieces for Developers and unlocking the power of AI.
A guide to empowering AI agents with tools via OpenAPI is available on the Nordic APIs blog. The guide offers a hands-on approach to build a chatbot and integrate it with Microsoft's Semantic Kernel Agents platform.
A report from TechRepublic highlights six AI trends that are likely to be prominent during 2025. These include the continued growth of machine learning, the emergence of privacy-preserving AI, and the adoption of AI in new industries and contexts.
Windows App SDK v1.7 Experimental2 Release, an update to the open-source toolkit that allows development of Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps has been released. The release includes bug fixes, reliability improvements and several new feature updates.
A Better Google Task App has been introduced that utilizes Google’s Task API and OAuth 2.0 authentication features to provide a better user experience. The app features user-friendly interface, simple authentication,
vlt has announced a new JavaScript package manager and serverless registry that is designed to improve the developer experience. The vlt platform provides a simple way to manage JavaScript packages, and includes a powerful serverless registry for reuse and sharing.
A web app debugging guide from the Auth0 blog explains how to avoid common JavaScript debugging pitfalls. The guide includes tips for using debugging tools in an efficient manner and troubleshooting performance issues.
Axel Rauschmayer of the 2ality blog provides a thorough overview of the new ECMAScript feature import attributes, which allows developers to associate various attributes with a module they are importing
The Sustainable Web Development with Ruby on Rails eBook has announced its latest changelog, which includes updated information on the latest version of Rails, as well as changes to its code snippets and examples.

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Scrum-Master-Toolbox

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Ellen Grove: The Messenger Anti-Pattern, When Product Owners Lack Authority

Ellen Grove discusses the importance of a product owner actively engaging with customers and promoting collaboration within the team.
She highlights the negative impact of a product owner lacking decision-making authority, hindering team progress.
Scrum Masters play an important role in supporting product owners to fulfill their responsibilities effectively.
The post also mentions Ellen Grove's expertise as a business agility coach, trainer, and facilitator.

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Medium

189

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Dependencies Are Here To Stay

The article by John Cutler explores the challenges of managing inter-team dependencies.
Cutler discusses three main types of organizational approaches to dependencies.
He advocates for clear commitments and forming dedicated teams for major initiatives.
The author proposes integrating cross-cutting dependencies into an outcome-focused prioritization process.

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Scrum

337

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How Scrum Teams Select Work: Collaboration Toward Value

The act of choosing work in Scrum is a collaborative effort by the entire Scrum Team.
The selection process considers factors such as value, risk, effort, and dependencies.
The selection should bring the team closer to the Product Goal.
Collaboration and shared understanding are crucial in selecting the right work.

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Dev

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The Agile Trap: Why Sprinting Alone Won’t Get You to the Finish Line

Agile without a roadmap can lead to sprinting in circles without progress.
Roadmaps complement Agile by keeping teams aligned and balancing short-term and long-term goals.
Combining Agile with roadmap planning involves starting with the big picture, chunking the roadmap into sprints, adapting while staying grounded, revisiting and updating regularly, and communicating relentlessly.
By combining Agile and roadmap planning, teams can stay flexible while delivering value and hitting deadlines.

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Scrum

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When to Change the Rules of Scrum?

Teams can follow the rules and constraints of the Scrum framework to self-manage and deliver value.
When teams are new to Scrum, following the rules strictly is recommended.
Finding the right moment to allow teams to bend the rules and experiment is important.
Scrum should never be the goal in itself, and teams can deviate if it works for them.

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Kanbanzone

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How to Manage Outsourced Software Development Projects with Kanban

Outsourcing software development projects is the only solution for companies that do not have internal IT resources but want to serve changing market needs. Implementing the right framework ensures an effective and smooth collaboration with a custom software development company. Kanban helps you streamline collaboration with outsourcing partners with practical examples, smart strategies, and essential techniques to get the most out of your project outcomes.
Kanban is rooted in Lean methodology, prioritizing efficiency, adaptability, and continuous improvement, and serves several critical purposes when collaborating with outsourcing teams. It guarantees that Kanban’s workflow will be streamlined and that coordination between internal and outsourced teams is going to stay on track.
Agile and Scrum Methodologies, DevOps Practices, and Cross-functional Teams are some key approaches that can help in tremendous ways in outsourced software development. Each approach aids in collaboration, project flexibility, and shared communication between all teams that are part of it.
Kanban Zones are a tool for Kanban-driven outsourcing management that is highly flexible and lets the users automate repetitive tasks, enable streamlining of processes, and reduce manual effort. Kanban metrics like lead time and cycle time are used to gauge productivity, identify which phases are causing delays and help target improvements.
By visualizing workflows, setting WIP limits, focusing on continuous improvement, and managing dependencies, companies can ensure timely, efficient, and quality project delivery. Kanban helps in structuring and simplifying the outsourcing workflow in a way that efficiently manages projects and provides high-quality output.

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Alvinashcraft

211

Image Credit: Alvinashcraft

Dew Drop – January 9, 2025 (#4338)

.NET MAUI 9.0.22 (Service Release 2.2) has been released, featuring improvements in collection view and startup performance, and an enhanced compatibility matrix.
Blazor File Manager is a package for efficiently handling large file uploads, providing built-in options for chunking, pause-and-resume, and progress tracking.
Raspberry Pi 5, featuring 16GB RAM, is now available for purchase at $120.
GitHub Copilot is a code suggestion tool trained on vast amounts of code, offering suggestions on the fly by drawing on its training data, now open-source.
Microsoft Edge Extensions will soon be more secure due to an upcoming Publish API, a more secure and streamlined process for managing extensions.
Azure Developer CLI is a tool for easily deploying and managing cloud resources on Microsoft Azure.
Flutter Fork is a fork of the Flutter UI toolkit, providing additional features such as libraries for REST APIs and state management.
STL is a collection of algorithms, data structures and functions while Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.PublicApiAnalyzers allow developers to prevent breaking changes.
Phi-4 AI model by Microsoft Research enables learning generative models with automatically added latent variables to improve sample and diversity performance.
Lessons learned over a decade of bootstrapping Petabridge includes adopting a remote-work mindset, and not being afraid to spend big to get ahead.

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Scrum

333

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Scrum Masters, what are you measuring in 2025?

Teams often measure the wrong metrics and what they are measuring is not worth improving, yet they are focused on it. Often these metrics end up creating a counterproductive issue for the team and it ends up doing mechanical scrum with zero focus on being effective.
As a Scrum Master, it is important to improve the overall effectiveness of the Scrum Team. However, if the team has wrong metrics of measurement then there will be no improvement.
One typical vanity metric is Velocity. Velocity should not be used as a productivity metric, instead it should solely be used as a forecasting metric. Other easily gamed and pointless metrics include Code Coverage >85%, Stories Planned vs Stories Completed, Sprint Pass vs Fail and a list of improvements.
To determine the right metrics to measure, the first step is to define the outcome clearly, the outcome that needs to be measured. Then, establish metrics to measure and understand that these metrics should focus on outcomes and impact.
Scrum Masters are advised to focus on defining clear outcomes and impacts; evidence-based management can be a good starting point to identify and define the metrics that suit your context.
If velocity is still being measured in 2025, it should be used solely for forecasting and not as a productivity metric.
Metrics must focus on outcomes and impact, defining clear outcomes is the first step in determining the metrics to measure.
Metrics that properly measure the outcome should be developed and used to generate desired results.
Metrics that teams should focus on measuring include measurable customer usage index, product cost ratio, new signups vs renewals vs unsubscribe ratio, and active time spent on newly released features/functionality.
Establishing metrics that suit your context and focusing on them will help teams move in the right direction.

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