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 estim...

2012 In March 2012, Ken Schwaber and I felt there was room for a new Scrum event in the Netherlands. We felt the need for an event that was a platform for people practicing Scrum. We wanted to crave space to talk, connect, share ideas, experiences and challenges on Scrum. On 11 July 2012 the...

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. In this blog post I'll describe the concept in more detail, explain why using a Sprint Goal is important and...

Question from a budding Scrum Master, who is transitioning from a background as a traditional project manager: “In order to promote team bonding and self-organization, from now on I am going to try something new with the team. In the sprint planning meeting, instead of me breaking down the tasks ...

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 b...

This video captures the feedback from the students on the Professional Scrum Foundation workshop facilitated in India. The students share their learnings on how writing granular user stories, story splitting, defining clear Scrum roles helps with agility. They talk about values and principles like s...

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. Within Scrum, self-organizing, cross-functional, and highly productive teams do the wor...

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. {"preview_thumbnail":"/drupal/s3fs-public/styles/video_embed_wysiwyg_preview/public/video_thumbnails/hC6H5MtsClY.jpg?itok=u_s1d7fm","vide...

I am sure it would not come as a surprise, but our website (www.scrum.org) needs a major refresh. The current implementation has become out of date and less and less supportive of our vision and mission. As a team, we quickly realized that we do not possess the resources needed to take on a full web...

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. The Scrum Master helps those outside the Scrum Team understand ...

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. This blog post focuses on the Development Team; I'll describe the characteristics, skills and conditions. Great Development Teams... ...

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. These are some practical tips that helped me and my clients on our journey. Start with Scrum ...

Pradeepa Narayanaswamy shares her insights into the keys of agile testing including understanding the agile testing mindset and goals. She discusses the responsibilities of a tester in an agile team and describes the diverse skill sets required in those teams.

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. It’s all about solving dependencies Nexus is focused is solving the primary source of issues and ...

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, comple...

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'? Scrum is a framework for product development, and specifically well suited for complex products. The Product Owner is the role in Scrum to bring the business perspective to the team(s) creating and sustaining a software product. The Product Owner acts as the single re...

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 o...

The domination of software development by a paradigm of industrial views and beliefs, a copy-paste of old manufacturing routines and theories, got us in a crisis. The attempts to overcome this crisis by fortifying the industrial approach are without result. The flaws and problems are huge, known and...

Within companies that use Scrum properly, the organization is built around fixed, cross-functional, self-organizing teams who are given the freedom and responsibility to think of a strategy they believe will result in the best product. Everyone around the Development Team is focused on supporti...

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...

PST Simon Reindl discusses how he has guided organizations through lasting change, what makes it complex and how to overcome the complexity.

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. A humbling experience before making our way forward again. Early 2011, nearly five years ago, Scrum.org launched th...

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." In my early career as a Scrum Master, I used to follow this definition quite stricly. Time was taken to look for o...

Inspiring Lessons From the Life Journey of Mr. Warrick Dunn __________ As many of us in the USA prepare for the big college football rivalry weekend, let’s take a moment to learn about Agile leadership from Warrick Dunn, retired football star with a storied career in college and...

It is my favorite time of the year - Fall, the season of thanks, reflection and resolutions. As we approach the end of one year and the beginning of a new one, I look back with thanks and appreciation at all this year has given to us. Among other things, I am thankful for you being part of my jou...

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 exampl...

PST Peter Gfader talks about organizations and teams and how to grow together as a team.

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? If so, then I celebrate *you* -- as a real Scrum Team Member -- the person who does the actual work that delivers value for the business. Allow me the h...

​​​​​​​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? Real Agile leaders abandon the top of the tower and thoughtfully empower an organization from the trenches, which fuels the connections that lead to high-performing Ag...

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? Capital-A Agile When people refer to capital-A Agile, mostly they are referring to the value stateme...

When Scrum is introduced in a company, most of the time, the development team embraces it with lots of enthusiasm. Scrum embodies self-organizing, autonomous, multidisciplinary teams that acknowledge individual qualities and reinforces the strengths of the team as a whole. Who doesn't want to be par...

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. Everything with the purpose of helping people understand and apply the Scrum framework better. In a series of blog posts...

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. The combination of Scrum and Asperger's hereby always...

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. You can read some more here: [What is The Daily Scrum for?] Years back, in the beginning of my adventures with Scrum, I worked ...

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.

Southern Fried Agile is the premier Agile event in Charlotte NC. It is a one day, content delivering, network creating conference with a focus on community and people talking. And I was lucky enough to be asked to present the keynote the last two years. This has given me the opportunity to ...

A lack of defined engineering practices, standards and tooling is an often observed problem in software development, regardless of whether Scrum is used. It reflects the appalling lack of attention to technical excellence in our software development industry. In a context of Scrum, it is even more e...

Many years ago I was told to be successful you have to have a personnel mission, a clear, short statement that says what you are all about. And mine is ‘to help people deliver software just a little bit better’. Actually this mission has changed from its inception with the addition of the words ‘jus...

Just like how the Development Team role and Scrum Master role that can be easily misunderstood, the Product Owner is also easily misunderstood by organisation who are using Scrum. Over and over again I see people who are assigned as Product Owner are not really a Product Owner, either they ...

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. The milestone belonged to a large project that concerned a comprehensive organizational change with multiple Scrum teams. This milestone was special, because it ...

Although the Daily Scrum seems to be a simple and straightforward event, I still encounter a lot of teams struggling with it. In this blog post, I'll share my tips & tactics. You can use it as a checklist for your own Daily Scrum, and hopefully, it helps you ensure the event to become (or stay) ...

I notice how many people struggle when they try to improve their understanding of Scrum. I notice it in classes, on forums, at conferences, through mail. They look for detailed instructions. They ask universal questions that demand exact and precise answers. How long should Sprint Planning b...