Blog

Managing One Product Backlog Across Many Teams

Jan 26, 2026 • 3 min read • Richard Hundhausen

When organizations scale Scrum to several teams, the first thing that tends to fracture is the backlog. Every team wants its own list, and before long you have three or four backlogs, three or four …

Azure DevOps Scrum

Inspecting Test Progress Mid-Sprint

Jan 12, 2026 • 2 min read • Richard Hundhausen

If your forecasted PBIs are expressed as failing acceptance tests, then progress becomes wonderfully simple to read. The more passing tests, the more progress. Right after Sprint Planning there should …

Azure Test Plans Scrum

Workflow State Categories: Why Your States Map the Way They Do

Dec 22, 2025 • 2 min read • Richard Hundhausen

Here's a question that stumps a lot of teams the first time they customize a process: how does Azure Boards know that "Committed" in Scrum and "Active" in Agile mean roughly the same thing? The agile …

Azure Boards Scrum Azure DevOps

Two of My Books Are in the Anthropic Settlement

Dec 9, 2025 • 3 min read • Richard Hundhausen

I've spent a fair amount of ink on this blog arguing that AI-generated code has no human author, and therefore no copyright. This post is the other side of that coin, and it's personal. Two of the …

AI WhoOwnsTheCode Life

Configuring Additional Teams in One Project

Dec 8, 2025 • 3 min read • Richard Hundhausen

When you create an Azure DevOps project, a single default team is created with the same name as the project. For single-team Scrum, you just add the Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Developers to that …

Azure DevOps Scrum

A Naming Convention for Test Cases

Nov 17, 2025 • 2 min read • Richard Hundhausen

A single PBI with five acceptance criteria can produce five or more Test Case work items. Multiply that across a forecast of eight PBIs and you're staring at 40-some test cases in a Sprint. Without a …

Azure Test Plans Scrum Preferred Practice

Scrum Work Item Types, Decoded

Oct 30, 2025 • 3 min read • Richard Hundhausen

Azure DevOps offers more than a dozen work item types, but most don't relate to planning and managing work. In the Scrum process, the ones that actually matter for a Scrum Team are Product Backlog …

Azure Boards Scrum

Area Paths vs. Iteration Paths

Oct 17, 2025 • 3 min read • Richard Hundhausen

Two of the most useful organizing concepts in Azure Boards get confused all the time, and the confusion creates real mess in a backlog. Area paths and iteration paths sound similar and live near each …

Azure Boards Azure DevOps Scrum

ATDD vs. TDD

Oct 1, 2025 • 2 min read • Richard Hundhausen

ATDD can sometimes be confused with TDD. It's akin to confusing ADHD with ADD, but I digress. The two practices share a family resemblance, and people who've only heard of one tend to assume it covers …

Scrum Development Testing