When do you estimate and what do you do when you need more time for discussion? In this third post of this series on Product Backlog refinement you will find some good practices on how to facilitate an effective and efficient refinement meeting.

The most common question I am asked at my courses is - what makes a good Scrum Master? I always answer this question with a story from my own experience working with Scrum Masters (good and bad) over the years.

Last week I participated in a Product Owner course facilitated by Gunther Verheyen. What triggered me was the part where we discussed the difference between having a

In this blog series, you will get some good practices and guidance for having better, more effective and more vivid Product Backlog refinement

Yes, of course it is! Scrum is a framework to help teams and organisations on their path to agility, but it is by no means the only way to be agile.

One of the most challenging activities in Scrum is Product Backlog Refinement. During training courses I get many questions on this activity. What do you do during Product Backlog refinement? How do you prevent discussions going off track or in too much detail? Who should be there? When do you estimate? In this blog series, you will get some good practices and guidelines for having better, more effective and more vivid Product Backlog refinement.

2012

When facilitating a Scrum Master training, the Sprint Goal is a topic that often causes a good discussion. Participants question the background, purpose and advantages of using a Sprint Goal.

Question from a budding Scrum Master, who is transitioning from a background as a traditional project manager:

Last year, I was facilitating a workshop on Agile and began the conversation, as usual with introductions. I asked each attendee what was the most important burning question that brought them to the workshop. One of the attendees replied

This week I facilitated a Scrum Master training in which we gathered the most common pitfalls of the Scrum events. It resulted in a nice overview with lots of recognizable pitfalls. In this blog post I'll share the results with you, completed with some ideas of my own. As you will see, it's only a brief description of the pitfalls.

This video captures the feedback from the students on the Professional Scrum Foundation workshop facilitated in India.

Scrum is a framework within which people can address complex problems, and productively and creatively develop products of the highest possible value. It's tool organizations can use to increase their agility.

This blog is the feedback on Scaled Professional Scrum using Nexus Framework and over 50 practices from the participants who attended my SPS workshop in India.

I am sure it would not come as a surprise, but our website (www.scrum.org) needs a major refresh.

The Scrum Master is responsible for ensuring Scrum is understood and enacted. Scrum Masters do this by ensuring that the Scrum Team adheres to Scrum theory, practices, and rules. 
The Scrum Master is a servant-leader for the Scrum Team.

Recently I wrote an article about the characteristics of a great Product Owner. It gave me the idea to do the same for the Development Team and Scrum Master.

Nexus and SPS have been online for a while. There are organisations around the world giving it a try and, of course, there are questions about how to set up and begin using Nexus in an organisation.

After downloading and studying the Nexus guide, you have questions about how the Nexus Integration Team actually works, so here are some keys to understand the role and its fit within the Nexus.

During a recent Product Owner training I gave the participants the assignment to complete the sentence "A great Product Owner..." The result was a nice overview of characteristics, skills and conditions necessary to fulfill this role in a great manner. In this blog post I'll share the result, completed with a short explanation and some more ideas of my own.

Last week I attended a workshop provided by Patrick Verheij, who is a board member of the Agile Consortium. Patrick explained the foundation of Agile and shared a characteristic of "Agile DNA" within organizations

What is a 'Product Owner'?

Recently I had a discussion with a developer about the amount of meetings we're having nowadays within organisations. Part of it was related to Scrum, "Since the introduction of Scrum all I do is attend meetings". And part of it wasn't, "Every week I need to discuss how to improve the productivity of my department... cancelling these type of meetings might be a good start..."

 

Comme on l'a vu durant la présentation, l'Agilité a des impacts à tous les niveaux et touche même les bases de données. Pour être capable de travailler efficacement dans un contexte Agile, le DBA doit ajuster sa manière de travailler autant en conception, que durant la réalisation ainsi qu'au moment de déployer l'application

At some occasions we stop to look back. We see the trail we left behind, the bigger picture, the impact we made. Small or big. We think of the impact we hoped to make, small or big.

This is a list of 10 questions a Scrum Master may ask a Product Owner, in order to help coach them in their role.

This blog post talks about the issues caused by unlimited budgets.

According to the Scrum guide, sprint retrospectives are "an opportunity for the Scrum Team to inspect itself and create a plan for improvements to be enacted during the next Sprint."

Inspiring Lessons From the Life Journey of Mr. Warrick Dunn   __________    

It is my favorite time of the year - Fall, the season of thanks, reflection and resolutions.

Recently I read the book 'The People's Scrum' by Tobias Mayer. In this book he spends a chapter on describing the differences between project culture and team culture. To me, the given examples of both types of culture are highly recognizable and I can easily extend and complement the list of examples with my own experiences.

Where do you spend your days in the workplace? Are you living in the Scrum-oriented trenches of your organization, like the vast majority of us?

​​​​​​​In my previous blog post 'The 9 Smells of an Organization' I described the difference between the terms commitment and forecast. This resulted in an intriguing discussion that triggered me to elaborate some more on this topic and share the highlights of this conversation.

Are you considered an authoritative "leader" in your organization? Do you spend your day at the top of the tower or in the trenches?

A few months ago I first saw the brilliant speech 'The Smell of the Place' by Prof. Sumantra Ghoshal. It's about corporate environments and the faults of management in creating a positive work place.

A lot of people talk about scaling Agile. It’s all the rage nowadays. Everyone wants to scale Agile. But what does that actually mean? What does it imply? What are the underlying assumptions?

When Scrum is introduced in a company, most of the time, the development team embraces it with lots of enthusiasm.

The role of a Scrum Master is one of many stances and diversity. A great Scrum Master is aware of them and knows when and how to apply them, depending on situation and context.

The subject of this blog post might seem unusual. But having worked with multiple development teams, I've gained some experience with team members having (symptoms) of Asperger's. I mostly contributed to the team as a Scrum Master or Agile Coach.

Before I begin, I have to make sure you’re not fixed on a misconception. The Daily Scrum is not a status meeting, nor a report back to the team. It’s a planning event.

In this blog, an overview of the professional QA as a quality coach for a cross-functional team is discussed.

When do you use Nexus?

The story of the Wygat Weed Whacker goes back many years – to the time we bought our first home in the beautiful town of Allen, TX.

 

A lack of defined engineering practices, standards and tooling is an often observed problem in software development, regardless of whether Scrum is used.

 

This blog post is about a little box. A little transparent box. The box contained only one sticky note. A sticky note with a milestone.