Why is our definition of done so long? I don’t like to call the definition of done the checklist for how we do things around here. I used to say that because you might be including every single little thing in your process when you do that, but does it have the essential elements of how do we know that this work is done? So why is our definition of done so long? In some cases, actually, it’s not long at all. My most common experience is that when I ask people what’s in their definition of done they say we met the acceptance criteria. There’s a lot more to done than just meeting the acceptance criteria. This typically happens when there’s a kind of a traditional approach to delivery and scrum has been wrapped inside that approach. I often call it water scrum fall and in waterfall, it’s very professional, it’s very good but it doesn’t have a thing called a definition of done. So this concept is alien to waterfall.

How do I measure value for a major IT infrastructure piece of work? How do I measure value? Before I even get into, how do I measure value? What is value? A lot of people struggle with this. I wrote an article about this here, what is value really? I think one of the reasons why the world is in the way it is, is because we over-indexed on a couple of meanings for that.

Have you ever heard of an interview being really bad? like REALLY bad? Come be a fly on the wall and watch a Scrum Master interview go really poorly. I wonder if he gets the job!

Trust is the Beginning of Agility. Learn how distrust manifests and what we can do to earn the trust of our stakeholders.

Kennst du den Scrum Guide wirklich? Halbwissen ist gefährlich. Es führt zu Fehlinterpretationen. Hier stelle ich 9 gängige Fehlinterpretationen vor, damit dir niemand vorwerfen kann, dass du den Guide nicht verstanden hättest:

En cada formación, consultoría o acción de acompañamiento que llevamos a cabo surge la misma pregunta, cuando usar Agile y cuando no. También por lo que vemos, hay mucha organización que le han vendido que se transformarán completamente en una organización agile. Cuando digo completamente digo la totalidad de sus departamentos y la totalidad de sus empleados. Además, se les vende Scrum a muchas organizaciones como el fin de sus males, cuando muchas veces, ese es el inicio de sus porqué intentan implementar Scrum con calzador en equipos que no deberían usarlo. Déjame mostrar cómo podemos dar un poco de luz a la decisión de usar Agile, de usar Scrum o de usar Kanban en una organización.

Are Scrum Masters here set up for success? Are they “leaders who serve”? Which of the Professional Scrum Master choices/stances can they choose from? Are they a core aspect of our organization's approach to leadership/management? Are they an afterthought to get a higher score on an agile maturity assessment or some RFP? Are they respected, and appreciated by the people they serve? Are they in high demand? Implementing the Scrum Master accountability effectively is hard. It ties straight into creating a servant leadership and self-managemement/empowering culture in which business agility thrives. These are some of the questions leaders should be asking and thinking about.

Was unterscheidet das Nexus Daily Scrum vom Scrum of Scrum?

Was, wenn nicht alle Mitglieder Ihres Scrum-Teams von der Retrospektive begeistert sind? Sollte man sie zur Teilnahme zwingen?

I confess that the first time someone told me that Scrum is based upon empiricism, I thought they were a little pretentious.  After all, it’s a five-syllable word for a framework with only five events.  Why make it so complicated?  But as I’ve coached more and more Scrum Teams over the years, I have learned that empiricism matters. It’s not just a fancy word; it’s the foundation of Scrum.

Mehr Projektleiter wollen Scrum Master werden. Das ist ein nachvollziehbarer Karrierewechsel, denn „Software frisst die Welt“. Allerdings ist der Wechsel nicht einfach! Hier 3 Mindset-Shifts, die du vollziehen solltest, wenn du dabei erfolgreich sein willst:

How many times have you heard statements such as, “This is not in my area of expertise”, “I don't know anything about it”, “That’s not my job”, “Ask another department” or “This is not what I studied for”? One might say that this is just their approach to gaining knowledge. It’s their style; to limit their scope of learning by concentrating on their specialism only, which doesn’t necessarily sound like a problem when speaking of experts in their fields, but what about organizations, products, and the services they provide? How does this previously mentioned approach to learning and self-development affect them?

What if not all of your Scrum team’s members feel enthusiastic about the Sprint Retrospective? How can you help them become dedicated supporters?

Jeder kennt die Haltungen eines Scrum Masters. Kennst du auch die Haltungen eines Product Owners? Ein Überblick über die Haltungen, die Product Owner je nach Situation einnehmen können:

Una de las primeras preguntas que siempre lanzo a los equipos y las organización que ayudo es la siguiente: ¿Vuestra planificación de sprint incluye objetivos de sprint? Con demasiada frecuencia, se menosprecia la importancia del Sprint Goal y se pasan por alto en favor de definir y organizar durante el Sprint Backlog.

Konferenz: nur trockene Vorträge voller langweiliger Theorie? Nicht so am Scrum Day 2022! Der diesjährige Scrum Day war gespickt mit Erfahrungsberichten und hilfreichen Werkzeugen. Hier stelle ich dir 3 Tools vor, die du sofort bei deiner Arbeit mit Scrum Teams einsetzen kannst:

A recent question received via TheScrumMaster.co.uk was – “How can I get my first Scrum Master role and gain experience if the available jobs require 2+ years of experience? What do you advise?”

In dieser 42. Hands-on Agile Session sprach Janna Bastow über Lean Roadmaps und OKRs.

In tis blog post, Professional Scrum Trainer Venkatesh Rajamani walks through challenges Scrum Masters face and how to resolve them.

Angehende Führungskräfte, die agil arbeiten wollen, haben es schwer! Zwar arbeiten die meisten Produktteams bereits nach Scrum, aber das Management vertraut weiterhin auf einen von Kontrolle geprägten Führungsstil. Die Führungskräfte, die in der Agilität die Arbeitsweise der Zukunft sehen und deshalb die Agile Transformation weiter vorantreiben wollen, stellt dies vor ein Problem: Wen sollen sie sich im Unternehmen zum Vorbild für diesen neuen Weg nehmen? Die Antwort dazu im Artikel:

During the first year of the pandemic, Scrum adoption more than doubled for software development teams. According to the 15th Annual State of Agile Report, the use of agile approaches for software development grew from 37% in 2020 to 86% in 2021. This means that agile adoption for software development doubled in a single year — the first year of the pandemic. I don’t think that is a coincidence.

In this Hands-on Agile session, Janna Bastow talked about being lean while creating and maintaining your roadmap and how objectives and key results (OKR) may help meet that challenge.

Welcome to Scrum Sutra – a blog series where I shall share a 3-min overview of each element of Scrum and how it connects with the other elements in the bead to form Scrum Sutra.

As a new Product Owner what are some of the things you might want to consider to help you on the amazing journey ahead.

Is it the Product Owner? The Developers? The Scrum Master?

Did you know that there are 17 United Nation, sustainable development goals. Did you know that when you’re measuring value, you can consider societal value as part of that. And that could include consideration for those 17 United Nation sustainable development goals. Now those 17 United Nation sustainable development goals, they do compete against each other.

Cycle time is where we’re measuring how long a work item takes to get from one part of our workflow to another part of our workflow.

How much money and time can actually be saved by automating your deployment pipeline?

Welche Verantwortung übernimmt ein Scrum Master im Unternehmen? Scrum Master sind für die Effektivität des Scrum Teams verantwortlich. Behindert etwas den Fortschritt des Teams, dann übernehmen sie die Verantwortung dafür, dass dieses Hindernis beseitigt wird. Hier findest du eine Übersicht über die fünf verschiedenen Arten von Hindernissen, denen du als Scrum Master begegnen kannst:

Scrum ist eine Einstellung. Die fünf Scrum-Werte beschreiben diese Einstellung. Einerseits hilft das Scrum-Rahmenwerk, diese Werte zu entdecken und zu erleben. Andererseits können wir an der Umsetzung des Rahmenwerks auch erkennen, wo unsere Einstellung von den Scrum-Werten abweicht. Mehr dazu im Artikel:

Como agile coach de organizaciones y de personas, a menudo me encuentro que muchos gerentes se equivocan tanto porque descuidan la función de planificación. También me he encontrado muchas veces que me han dicho que cuando somos ágiles no planificamos. Y eso no es verdad. En la agilidad se planifica un montón, pensad en Scrum o Kanban, es una planificación constante. Te expongo en este artículo 7 razones que creo que un gerente puede mejorar con autodisciplina.

Product Goals were added to the 2020 version of the Scrum Guide. The idea of incorporating this concept was to emphasize the importance of having a longer-term goal than a Sprint Goal.

Super smart people get stuck and insist on finding solutions all by themselves. Ego paired with stubbornness are the usual culprits that can hinder better solutions. Admit you don’t know. Ask for help. Create a learning culture by using modern tools to collaborate. Get some fresh air, grab a pop-tart and level up while you get work done.

How can we use Monte Carlo Probabilistic Forecasting to set expectations in scrum?

Product Owner und Produktmanager Gehaltsbericht 2022 — eine kostenlose Studie für die Community

Who writes acceptance criteria?. Should you even have acceptance criteria? It's a loaded question, because it's assuming that we're using user stories. And in user stories typically you might say in order to deliver a particular type of value, some particular persona wants or needs something in order to do so, and then you typically list off your acceptance criteria.

In our recent article “Why You Shouldn’t Modify Scrum,” we discussed five reasons why modifying Scrum is counterproductive.  We’ll expand on the topic in this article by exploring five more ways organizations sometimes change Scrum and the impacts they might experience as a result.  

Why refinement is an essential skill for Scrum teams to create small, specific, and realistic improvements.

But when you have scrum, for example, you need to deliver an increment every single sprint and that increment needs to be done. So the team needs to have a thing called a Definition of Done and done does not mean met the acceptance criteria. Doesn’t just mean that, there should be other considerations as well. So there’s the definition of done. I don’t want to really call it the checklist for how we do things around here, because that might be a bit too process-oriented and maybe a bit too detailed. There’s a nice balance between trust and being clear what we need to do, but as such the team would know what they need to do for something to be called on at the end of the sprint so they can show something at the end of the sprint. That’s all fine. But what do the developers do in the last week of the sprint? It feels like a loaded question because the assumption that I’m reading from the question is that the developers, in your case, write the code, and then they hand it off to some people who do some testing.

How can you scale in Scrum and what scaling patterns can you use?

Join the Product Owner and Product Manager Salary Report 2022 — an Anonymous Poll by the Community for the Community to create transparency.

Besser Planung und Aufteilung der Arbeit führt nicht zu mehr Team-Performance. Die individuelle Auslastung von Teammitgliedern führt zu Engpässen. Wie kannst du individuellen Auslastung im Team vorbeugen? Meine bewährte Strategie hierfür findest du im Artikel:

En el desarrollo tradicional, ya sea en cascada o iterativo, el “gerente de producto” es la persona que posee la hoja de ruta del producto, defiende el producto internamente y representa al cliente en las reuniones con el desarrollo. El desarrollo ágil marcó el comienzo de un rol llamado ‘Product Owner’. El product owner des del punto de vista de la guía Scrum, ordena el product backlog y maximiza el valor de negocio.

An investigation of scientific research into what motivates teams, and how many of these insights informed the Scrum framework and other Agile methodologies

Many people modify Scrum to fit popular project management tools like Jira. Removing parts of Scrum, like Product Goals, that don’t have an obvious fit seems to be the easiest option. A better approach is to modify tools and team processes to work with Scrum. Don’t learn Scrum from tools because they don’t know Scrum.

SDLC is an acronym that means either Software Delivery Life Cycle or Systems Development Life Cycle. And it is a lie. A fiction. A total fabrication. Somebody made it up out of thin air many years ago and the idea was cemented deep into corporate bureaucracy.

As a new Scrum Master what are some of the things you might want to consider to help you on the amazing journey ahead.

Wenn funktionierende Software kein Garant mehr für Erfolg ist, ist das Manifest für Agile Softwareentwicklung dann noch zeitgemäß?

Der 11. Teil des Leitfadens für das Scrum Master Interview befasst sich mit dem Sprint Review — Avoid hiring imposters!

Would Wayne be a good Scrum Master? If you're familiar with the Hulu show "Letterkenny", then you most likely already have an opinion. You be the judge on if Wayne's catchphrases set him up for success in his interview for a Scrum Master role.