"That's the thing about zombies. They don't adapt and they don't think." - Max Brooks One of the earliest challenges I ever had to resolve, as a Scrum Master, was the proper disposal of the dead.

As a travelling Scrum and DevOps consultant I’m constantly asked “should our team use Scrum”? Now you might think that being a Professional Scrum Trainer – and serious Scrum fanboy – I would always answer “Yes!”. Well, you would be wrong.

In this blog post, we will describe the myth that the Sprint Backlog is fixed during the Sprint. We'll bust this myth by offering the perspective from the Scrum Guide and describing the difference between forecast and commitment.

Do you have time for an experiment? Then please ask me a coaching question!   Welcome to the first of a two part blogpost full of curiosity filled questions on coaching!

In this blog post I'll share my view on the Scrum Master as the Change Leader. I'll briefly describe the common misunderstandings and the preferred stances of the Scrum Master. The services a Scrum Master provides for the Development Team, Product Owner and organisation, and the 3 levels that can be considered as a growth path for the Scrum Master. Want to know why the Scrum Master should be a Change Leader? Check out this article.

We describe the myth that the Scrum Master should always be present during the Daily Scrum. We'll offer the perspective from the Scrum Guide, describe examples of problems in how Scrum is applied and share tips & tricks on how to make the Daily Scrum more effective.

Never an easy answer and always being pulled in multiple directions, a question often asked: How many Scrum Teams should I be on?

The PSD training teaches the whole Scrum Team on how to do real Scrum. They work in Sprints, create Done software and use the appropriate tools and practices for it. It is a unique experience on how really good Scrum feels like.

Courage however is more than just learning what it means and telling your teams to be courageous.

When an organization decides to embark on an Agile Transformation, the first question should be, “Why?”   What does leadership hope to achieve?  Will the chosen path lead to improved ability to deliver high-quality business value? &

An estimate is our best guess for what can be achieved and by when. There are some situations when estimates are very important:

Over the past years I have been looking for a metric that could indicate the agility of an organization. After a study of the more common metrics used for products and management reports, I couldn’t really find a metric that indicates the level of agility.

When multiple Scrum Teams are working on one product, shared DoD becomes necessary. DoD helps to ensure that each increment is transparent by the end of every Sprint and creates a shared understanding of what “Done” means.

Although people with disabilities do have special needs, their purchase power isn’t special: it’s the same as everyone else’s. No longer can we think of accessibility as a compliance play. It’s simply good business. Let me frame this point with my story.

La aceptación de los PBIs en Scrum es algo que suscita dudas en los equipos. En realidad es muy fácil.

Our real-time, globalized world thrives increasingly on information and technology. The balance of businesses and society has rapidly shifted from industrial (often physical) labor to digital (often virtual) activities.

Hay una secuencia lógica que aquellos alumnos que han asistido al curso de Professional Scrum Master experimentan: Darse cuenta que Scrum no es en muchas ocasiones lo que ellos pensaban. Preguntarse qué hace el Scrum Master todo el día. Y una tercera que revelaré más adelante.

m Una mejor manera de construir productos Scrum es un proceso de gestión que reduce la complejidad en el desarrollo de productos para satisfacer las necesidades de los clientes. La gerencia y los equipos de Scrum trabajan juntos alrededor de requisitos y tecnologías para entregar productos funcionando de manera incremental usando el empirismo.

In this article, I suggest that you take a look at the role of a Scrum Master with a help of causal loop diagrams. They help to see a bigger picture of what is happening over time. Quite often, we observe the cause-and-effect relationships on a short-time horizon period, and do not notice when the links are spaced in time.

In this blog post I've shared the idea of doing a free Retrospective after every training we provide. The goal of this session is to inspect the progress that has been made and define actionable and committed improvements for the upcoming period.

Cuando se trata de literatura ágil, donde hace años no había prácticamente nada, ahora hay una abundancia que hace realmente difícil elegir.

Hay una frase de Ken Schwaber, creador de Scrum, que se ha hecho muy famosa a lo largo de los años. Scrum es simple, pero no es fácil. ¿Cual es la razón de que Scrum sea tan difícil de implementar? He aquí 3 retos típicos con los que seguro que tendrás que lidiar

As the saying goes, it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey. The same could be said about DevOps and its implementation in an organization. Yes, the result is magic since it aims to deliver daily business value, but the journey is even more interesting. This journey is full of organizational, technological, but especially human discoveries.

"It's weird when you get roles that coincide with your life" - Lily James

El Nexus Integration Team es un nuevo rol dentro de Nexus, el framework de referencia para escalar Scrum. A diferencia de el Scrum of Scrums, que es solamente una reunión ad-hoc, el NIT, como rol, cumple la función de asegurar que al final de cada Sprint, en el Sprint Review, el Nexus entrega un incremento integrado que cumpla la definition of Done mínima para el Nexus.

Una de las cuestiones que se plantean habitualmente en organizaciones, equipos y Agile Coaches, es el uso de un método que permita organizar el trabajo de forma ágil. El uso de un método como Scrum o Kanban va mucho más allá del proceso en sí, sino que suponen una herramienta para mejorar la capacidad de adaptación, gestión de riesgo e innovación.

En su reciente reporte anual, LinkedIn ha considerado el de Scrum Master como uno de los trabajos con más futuro del 2017. Con un salario medio anual de 100.000$, el número de puestos disponibles para Scrum Masters está previsto que se duplique este año.

I want to address those of you who don't really want the feedback. I mean, as important as feedback is, and as many times as you've heard that the central point of a Sprint Review is feedback…you're tired of it. It's pesky. And it just gets in the way of you doing what you know is right anyway.

'Scrum isn't perfect' is something I hear quite frequently, be it as an excuse not to stick to the few rules Scrum has or not to use it at all. The thing is though that no set of rules is perfect, but we're used to stick to them anyway.

I recently had the pleasure of conducting Scrum.org’s Professional Scrum Foundations workshop to a group of students at the nonprofit job-training program, Year Up, in Boston. Teaching this group of millennials -- motivated, talented young adults from low-income background -- was an illuminating experience that ended up teaching me something about being a Scrum trainer as well as the future of software development.  

La velocidad es uno de los temas de Scrum más discutidos online y offline. Sólo hace falta acercarse a la comunidad de Scrum Masters en Facebook para comprobar como muchas de las cuestiones planteadas están en la linea de la velocidad de entrega de los equipos de desarrollo de Software.

El Sprint Backlog suele generar bastantes dudas en cuanto a su gestión. En ocasiones se convierte en un arma arromadiza que los stakeholders, el Producto Owner o incluso el Scrum Master utilizan para controlar el equipo. ¿Es esta su función?

In Scrum, the Product Owner is an entrepreneur and the mini-CEO of a product, who is able to make fast decisions. The success of the Scrum Team and company as a whole depends on whether the Product Owner is real.

This blog post will be about the question "Should a Scrum Master be technical?". I'll describe my personal journey, share some opinions of other experiences and give you some examples of Technical Scrum Masters I've worked with.

Comme dit le dicton ce n'est pas la destination, mais la route qui compte. On pourrait dire la même chose pour DevOps et de son implantation dans une organisation. Oui, le résultat est magique puisqu'il vise à nous faire livrer quotidiennement de la valeur d'affaires, mais le périple l'est d'autant plus. Ce périple est rempli de découvertes organisationnelles, technologies, mais surtout humaines.

Most of the Agile transformations I have witnessed have started like this: First, a company raises a strategic initiative on so-called Agile implementation. A large budget is allocated and a tender is arranged to purchase Agile coaching services from companies on the market. Then employees are trained, and the pilot teams start working. However, they immediately stall, because there is lots of tension between them and an old cultural landscape.

“The secret of success is to be ready when your opportunity comes” - Benjamin Disraeli  

I hear it all the time. Whether it is a consulting engagement or in a Professional Scrum Course, the desire to modify Scrum comes up frequently.

People don't always think of Scrum Teams handling customer needs. But, for a Scrum Team to have success understanding the customer is key.

This blog post will focus on how to get started and succeed with Zombie-Scrum. What do you really need to have in place? What are the tips & tricks to give your Zombie-Scrum implementation a kick-start? How to make it sustainable? This article will offer you some nice recommendations.

Just as teams benefit from diverse, multi-functional teams, at the macro-level organizations can benefit from diverse practices such as systems thinking, design thinking, Lean practices and Agile.

After experiencing my fair share of frustrating Sprint Review moments, I want to share some tips to improve the feedback you receive.

Some companies develop 1 product with 10s to 100s of people using Scrum. And they do that without adding any roles, events or processes to Scrum. They can do this because they use an organisational design that optimises for the right goals.

I have read in several Lean and DevOps sources that the Sprint events imply a kind of waste, so teams are supposed to move to a Continuous Delivery or Kanban lifecycle as they become mature.

In this blog post I'll share my view on the question "What is a Scrum Master actually doing during the day?" I will use different sources and perspectives to answer this question and clarify the title and describe a day in the life of a Scrum Master.

In part 1 of this blog, we looked at what software inventory is and why it's problematic for business.

Scrum is often called the art of the possible. This means we do the best we can with what we

This blog post will be about the question: can you rotate the Scrum Master role? With rotating the Scrum Master role I mean frequently changing the person fulfilling this role.

The Sprint Goal is an important part of Scrum. It's like a burning torch that unites the Development Team and helps it move forward during the Sprint.

The truth is, worrying about velocity is a trap: it says “we don’t care where we end up, so long as we get there fast.” That’s just wrong. Teams who measure their velocity but don’t or can’t measure customer outcomes may, quite simply, be driving in the wrong direction.