Scrum

The first days in a new position can be confusing and lead to avoidable mistakes. These Scrum master best practices will help you become the servant-leader your team needs.

This article is part of Toptal’s Agile scaling series, designed to guide project managers in their team expansion efforts. In this second installment, Toptal Scrum expert Ammar Raafat discusses how Scrum masters moving into the role of release train engineer can help their teams thrive.

The yearly World Quality Report created by Capgemini shows that 42% of survey respondents list a “lack of professional test expertise” as a challenge in applying testing to Agile development. While the advent of Agile has brought the increased speed of iterations for software development, in some cases this has come at the cost of quality.

The scrum master role has been gaining popularity with the widespread adoption of Agile. Startups adopt Scrum at an ever earlier stage and look for professionals to help them out. There are some simple questions a scrum master candidate can ask to find the right startup company for their skill set.

Scrum is easy to introduce but hard to master. Left to its own devices, Scrum creates false hopes and undercuts many of the expected benefits. Scrum teams need to continually improve their process and work culture to reap the rewards of an Agile transition.

Have you ever wanted to have all of the Software Development Methodologies explained in one place? If so, here is an ultimate blueprint about what is Lean, Agile, Scrum and Kanban. This is the first part of the series where we explain all the different methodologies used in Software Development.

When a software developer hears news about a "new JavaScript framework" or a "new IDE," he doesn't need to ask more questions to clarify what it's about. But if he hears about a "new agile framework," he will likely do the Homer-Simpsonian nodding, pretending that he knows what it's about, but he will have one, and only one, question: _"What the heck does 'agile framework' mean?"_ In the modern software development environment, we increasingly hear words like "agile," "scrum," and "kanban," and they are often used improperly. In this article, I'll try to explain and to clarify some of these terms.

Simply calling something Agile isn't particularly helpful. The word, even in a software context, means different things to different people or organizations. There are many facets, definitions, implementations, and interpretations. In this article, Toptal Head of Projects Paul Barnes teaches about behaviors, frameworks, techniques, and concepts supporting agile project management in software development.