You may have heard of the phrase 'Scrum ceremony'. Which is odd because it's never appeared in the Scrum Guide. But clearly it exists and it's in common use. So, where did it come from? What does it mean? Let's find out.

10+ years of helping organizations scale Scrum from one team to 500+ teams has taught me one thing - most practitioners abandon the scientific principles and core values of Scrum in their pursuit of scaling Scrum. To many of these practitioners, Scaling Scrum is a whole another ball-game to which Scrum principles and values do not apply.

As we head toward the five year anniversary of announcing the Scrum.org Global Professional Training Network (PTN) program read a reflection on the value that this group of partner organizations has brought to Scrum.org, the Professional Scrum Trainer community and most importantly the students who have taken Professional Scrum classes from these partners.  

Troverete qui di seguito una serie di articoli, le basi di Scrum, che approfondiscono i concetti che potete ritrovare nello Scrum Guide 2020 (versione italiana).

Hochperformante Teams, die vorhersagbar liefern, tragen maßgeblich zum Erfolg von Unternehmen bei.

In this Unstuck Leadership Moment, PST Mark Wavle explores one of the challenges that many servant leaders face.

Hace unos días tuvimos un intento de interrumpir un evento virtual que realizamos en Zoom. Se filtraron aparentemente varias personas que impidieron el normal desarrollo de nuestro evento ya que tomaron el control del contenido a proyectar y de la voz. Estas cosas suelen suceder y es parte del aprendizaje sobre todo si el evento abierto, gratuito y en vivo.

Iterative, incremental delivery is critical to a successful Agile team.  Without it, Agile is really just window dressing.  Here are five examples that attempt to illustrate the concept of iterative, incremental delivery in a single image.  No example is perfect.  Let me know what you think in the comments and if you have another way to explain these concepts.

10+ years of helping thousands of practitioners with implementation of Professional Scrum has taught me one thing - most practitioners have a very superficial understanding of Scrum. To most, Scrum is nothing more than "Daily Standup" and "Sprint Demo".

Supposedly, Confucius said once: "Let’s start fixing the nation with fixing the concepts first". Whether he really said it or not, nobody can be sure. But what is important, I would like to specify the meaning of Kanban. Very often people understand it in their own way and when two people talk to each other about it, they mean two different things.

TL; DR: Maximizing Utilization as a Relic from the Industrial Management Past There are plenty of failure possibilities with Scrum.

Leaders use the Scrum Artifacts as a window into the work of the Scrum Team. This transparency enables inspection and adaptation at the appropriate level while enabling the team to self-manage. 

​​​​​​​As a Professional Scrum Trainer, I love working from home, but engaging with others in a remote environment can be challenging. If you’re using Scrum remotely and need stakeholder feedback to order your Product Backlog, here are a few ideas for how to gather it virtually.

La agilidad no ha parado de extenderse en los última década e incluso las organizaciones que miraban con recelo todo este movimiento están dando sus primeros pasos y viendo cómo pueden sumarse aumentando así su competitividad. ¿Cómo está conviviendo en estas compañías mentalidades tan diferentes? ¿Cómo están respondiendo los Product Owners a las necesidades? 

The Sprint Review is one of the most crucial events that can help your organization maximize the value of the work done by the Scrum Team. However, in 10+ years of helping clients implement Scrum, we have discovered that the Sprint Review can be a massive waste of time because of two big mistakes. In this video, we explain what these two biggest mistakes are and how our clients have learned to avoid them.

In a recent episode of Your Daily Scrum, Professional Scrum Trainers Todd Miller and Ryan Ripley address a general question in Scrum circles: What Does a Scrum Product Owner Do All Day?

In a recent episode of Your Daily Scrum, Professional Scrum Trainers Todd Miller and Ryan Ripley teach you the Scrum Framework in 7 minutes!

In a recent episode of Your Daily Scrum, Professional Scrum Trainers Todd Miller and Ryan Ripley debunk a general myth in Scrum circles: Creating a High Performing Scrum Team is NOT the Goal!

It's time to look at the Scrum Events

In today's vlog, PST Joshua Partogi will show you how your Scrum Team can save time and make a forecast during Sprint Planning with #NoEstimates & Kanban metrics.

Scrum celebrated its 25 year anniversary last year with an update to the Scrum Guide and lots of socially distanced parties. Over that quarter of a century, Scrum has gone from a niche method used by software developers to mainstream adoption with many millions of people using Scrum or at least parts of Scrum every day. Now Scrum is not just a smart way of delivering software, it is a fundamental part of any enterprise agility transformation. 

​​​​​​​The Sprint Review meeting is one of the Product Owner’s most important events.  But even the most important events can become a little stale over time.  Here are five ideas to spice up your Sprint Review meeting. 

Die Firma Skype hat in den frühen 2010er Jahren Scrum eingesetzt, und alle zwei bis vier Wochen Releases rausgebracht. Dennoch hat WhatsApp sie völlig abgehängt, wie wir heute wissen. Und das obwohl die Mannschaft hinter WhatsApp viel kleiner war als die hinter Skype. Wie konnte das passieren?

All teams have leaders. They're re accountable, amongst other things, for their team’s effectiveness. Perhaps the best way to enable this effectiveness is to empower the team. But how to empower the team? This article covers three easy tips to do just that.

Das Problem mit Features ist, dass sie fertiggestellt und ausgeliefert werden sowie perfekt funktionieren, aber dennoch keinen Wert liefern können.

Alguna vez te has preguntado: ¿Cuáles son los beneficios de usar Scrum y trabajar en equipo con el marco?

Being a Scrum Master can be tough. You are accountable for helping organisations change the way they approach complex work. If you upset enough of the wrong people you may end up “changing” yourself out of a job.

In this Unstuck Leadership Moment, PST Mark Wavle explores the question, "How do I help an unmotivated team?"

A lot of talk in the Agile space centres on breaking down silos, and yet it appears that in practice it is one of the things that is met with the most inertia.

We started the Scrum Guide for Leaders series with a discussion of what Scrum means for you as a Leader. Next, we discussed the conditions where Scrum's Empiricism, Self-Management, and Continuous Improvement can thrive. We then explored some concrete examples of how adopting the Scrum Values as a Leader can help you create these conditions.

There are plenty of failure possibilities with Scrum. Since Scrum is an intentionally incomplete framework with a reasonable yet short “manual,” this effect should not surprise anyone.

As mentioned earlier, Scrum is founded on empiricism - transparency, inspection, and adaptation. Empiricism is only possible in certain cultures and contexts. Leaders have the role of creating and nurturing the culture and shaping the context.

The 2020 version of the Scrum Guide dropped the classic “three questions” of the Daily Scrum. Yet many teams stick with the practice, even when it doesn’t produce the collaboration that is the hallmark of a valuable Daily Scrum. When a Scrum Team I worked with said that their Daily Scrum was lackluster and unproductive, I challenged them to design a better one. The new pattern we created shifted the focus from individual action to team collaboration toward the Sprint Goal.

Häufiges Feedback ist der Motor, meine Schulungen ständig zu verbessern.

The more ambiguous the requirement, the more difficult it is to calculate how long something will take. But teams still need to estimate their work to forecast releases. Relative sizing provides a realistic method for estimating. Ultimately, your team will find their own value scale and their own language that is meaningful to them. Until then, these Practical Fibonacci tips will help kick-start your relative sizing.

The future is unknown and although some people claim to be able to predict the future, most people can't. But to look a little ahead, into the future, to have a sense of when certain items on the Product Backlog are finished, predictability would be very useful. Although we can't be completely predictable, it is helpful if we are a little more predictable than we are now. And therefore we need some measurement results from the near past.

(And that should benefit experienced Scrum Masters too)

In today's vlog I would like to come back to the fundamentals of Scrum ... Done Increment.

In this Unstuck Leadership Moment, PST Mark Wavle explores the question, "How do I know if my measures are the best ones?"

TL; DR: My Top Ten Worst Scrum Anti-Patterns I recently was invited to a Scrum.org Webinar, and I picked a topic close to my heart: the worst Scrum anti-patterns.

A Scrum Event is a meeting. So why don't we just call it that? Why create a new word? Given the poor reputation that meetings have, maybe it's not a surprise. Rather than replicate the name and pain of meetings, the Scrum Events are designed to replace them and be all that you need. The power of the Scrum Events is in the way they're time-boxed and in their purpose. Let's take a closer look.

If you’re leading Scrum Teams or generally are a leader in an organization that’s leveraging Scrum?

Scrum Teams entwickeln eben nicht nur Produkte und Services, sondern betreiben diese auch. Ohne den Betrieb einer Anwendung ist es unmöglich, Feedback zu erhalten. Allerdings ist Feedback essenzielle für erfolgreiche Scrum Teams, da es die Triebfeder ist, um Nutzer- und Kundenwünsche zu erfüllen. Beim Betrieb von Produkten und Services kommt es zwangsläufig zu ungeplanter Arbeit. Fehler treten auf, Nutzer geben Feedback, Kunden brauchen Support und Notfälle treten ein.

Let me share some of the controversial findings and discussions with you. As always, there are no simple answers in complex environments.

The term 'Scrum Master' seems to have been around as long as Scrum. But has it? In this article I talk about where the term came from and why it was initially used.

Why hire a professional Scrum Master? They cost extra and you can always get one of the developers to do the work, part-time. Big saving, right? Not so much. Here's why.

This question comes up when discussing the accountabilities of the Scrum Team and the Developers. The Scrum Guide says on page 5: 

So many times, I’ve heard that round about 50–70 % of all software features are rarely or never used. In the Cloud we can now even measure it.

The Applying Professional Scrum class is frequently overlooked when it comes to public classes.  People tend to go for the Professional Scrum Master class or the Professional Scrum Product Owner class instead.  And those are really great classes.  That is… they’re great for those who already have an understanding of the Scrum framework.

The Scrum Guide has a lot to say about the Product Backlog, and rightly so. It's pivotal to everything a Scrum Team does. But one thing the Scrum Guide doesn't tell you, is how you create a Product Backlog. So, here's one way you can do exactly that.