Community Blog

As part of the Scrum.org webinar “Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer - Martin Hinshelwood - Answering Your Most Pressing Scrum Questions” I was asked a number of questions. Since not only was I on the spot and live, I thought that I should answer each question that was asked again here, as well as those questions I did not get to.

Product Owners have a tough job. I was in a Sprint Review recently where the Scrum Team had some stakeholders talking about an idea they thought was excellent. So, like any studious Product Owner, they immediately typed up the idea and added it to their Product Backlog.

Let’s look at some factors that cause diffusion of responsibility.

At a recent training class one of the delegates spoke about their present company, about how it was the most “Agile” place he had ever worked.

I share my thoughts in this video about the practices and activities the Scrum Master should be doing to increase his/her awesomeness. Hopefully it will help you to find the gap towards awesomeness.

Scrum se basa en un proceso empírico. El empirismo se basa en tomar decisiones basados en la información concreta obtenida de la observación que muestra el progreso del desarrollo de producto, el empirismo se basa en la experimentación para validar las hipótesis.

Every year I like to deliberately go somewhere far from the crowd to take a break and reflect. You can say that it's similar to a retrospectives. Often times I may not realised whether as a Scrum Master my service to the organisation is already effective or not.

Many Scrum Teams are not very familiar with the Scrum Values as described in the Scrum Guide, and if, they have their own interpretation of it. We have also met many teams that were able to name the values, but not many live by them.

A customer I was working with asked me to help out with the intake process for recruiting a new Scrum Master and a new Product Owner. I asked them what they had so far. They provided a clear job description describing what they wanted to see from the candidates.

Software developers are mostly guys, happy to work by themselves at night in dark rooms. And they turn coffee, cola and pizza into code. Right?

TL;DR: Scrum Master Duties, Serving a Single Team Scrum Master Duties: supposedly, a great Scrum Master serves only one Scrum Team—that’s at least a popular narrative in the Scrum community.

The Liberating Structure "Wicked Questions" makes paradoxical realities transparent. By doing so, you can engage in deeper strategic thinking and explore new possibilities.

Why is it that when the going gets tough, “agile” gets the blame? There is so much online bashing of [insert random agile framework or method] going on, that it made me wonder if there is a pattern behind it. I believe there is.

This blog gives a Lean perspective on the Agile Manifesto.

The unpredictability of the market and competitors are the main reasons of traditional management is not enough/fit to reach success.

Unclear language leads to incomplete transparency and ambiguity. The careful use of words like ‘bug’ will improve decision-making in your organization.

The core responsibility of the agile leader is creating the right context for the agile teams so they can thrive and self-manage. One of the characteristics of this context is all about ownership. In my book ‘Agile Leadership Toolkit’ I dedicate a whole part to this important topic.

How common misunderstandings about the Scrum Roles prevent Scrum Teams to become effective

In this blog post, I’ll explain how it’s possible for managers to work with Scrum Teams so no one has to worry about rebuilding their resume.

If Scrum were to be reduced to one purpose and one only, it would be the creation of a "Done" increment. Although the DoD serves as a crucial part of Scrum, it is also often neglected by many Scrum teams. Try out the DoD EvoCycle, a simple technique to effectively manage your Definition of Done.

Want to know if your team or organisation is suffering from Zombie Scrum? Find out with our free symptom checker and get help. And join our worldwide research into how teams work with Scrum, and what works for them.

“We want to be more agile in our delivery.” “We need to build up our teams.” “How can we do Scrum well?” Companies are asking themselves these questions every day and looking in various places for the answers.

‘Autonomy without accountability equals anarchy’ summarizes an essential design element of any agile organization. Without these checks and balances in place any aspiration to transform an organization is likely to fail.

This article will give you a clear explanation of how to become a good leader in this competitive world, and the techniques and tools required to reach the height of success.

Este artículo es la segunda parte de otro donde hablaba de como integrar el trabajo de los especialistas de UX y los desarrolladores de software.

Tanto el desarrollo de software Agile como el diseño de experiencia de usuario (UX) tienen como objetivos comunes entregar antes sistemas más usados y valiosos para el cliente.

Being a Scrum Master requires to take many different stances and approaches when working together with teams and individuals. Two of them that are probably used most are “Coaching” and “Mentoring”.

An example of how to use Liberating Structures to improve the Sprint Review.

Millennials in the workplace. Agile and Scrum can help virtually any organization, from small startup tech businesses with mostly young employees to well established Fortune 2,000 companies with a much more experienced staff.

Icebreakers: are they a complete waste of time or do they add value? Some people absolutely love them, other absolute dislike them because they didn’t add any value. I believe a well-designed icebreaker can kickstart your session, can be fun and get people warmed-up for the rest of the session. Learn about how you can design icebreakers that add value and that grow connection between the participants and the purpose of a session.

A meta-retrospective is an excellent exercise to foster collaboration within the extended team, create a shared understanding of the big picture, and immediately create valuable action-items.

In this blog, Professional Scrum Trainer Peter Koning talks about his book, Agile Leadership Toolkit - Learning to Thrive with Self Managing Teams.

“A good review from the critics is just another stay of execution” -- Dustin Hoffman

Learn more on how to tackle impediments as a team by running experiments, iterating and visualizing on the solution.

Have you ever been curious about what really motivates the people you work with? What are they looking for in their role and in their work? If you can find an hour with your team, I recommend you to try the Moving Motivators practice (Management 3.0). Let's unpack how to prepare and run the exercise and end with some learnings.

This post covers four team building mental models — or concepts — that have proven useful in understanding the context of creating agile teams: from Taylorism to Tuckman to Lencioni to Dan Pink.

This is a common question in my Professional Scrum classes. It often comes up early when we are still learning the basics of the Scrum framework. And it comes up because people are already wearing two hats or are being told by their organizations that they will be.

In this article, I’ve described my personal journey in becoming a Scrum Master and included recommendations for new Scrum Masters.

Scrum is a goal driven framework. And that is what I really like about Scrum. If I can summarize Scrum Guide into one sentence, it is about delivering an increment that meets the Sprint Goal.

Scrum.org is stating it: "The PSM III credential is very difficult to earn, as it is used to demonstrate the certificate holder’s ability solve advanced, complex problems in real-world applications of Scrum.

How a Scrum Master can use the “Strategy Knotworking” to help the Scrum Team turn their ideas and ambitions into reality.

El aspecto principal del desarrollo de un producto no debe ser el trabajo de UX, es importante como otros tipos de trabajo como arquitectura, pruebas, etc.

Popularized by Elon Musk, utilizing first principles thinking to solve problems in an innovative, creative, and less biased way has proven popular in the tech community.

Many years ago, I questioned myself about what makes a software product successful and what makes it fail.

The Scrummer'19 quiz is slowly coming to an end. Today we are kicking off the 5th and last iteration of the Scrum Summer Quiz. There are still two copies of the book Software in 30 Days, authored and autographed by Ken Schwaber, to be raffled off. 

How effectively are you maximizing value when dependencies tell you what to do first? Dependencies impact the core of the role of Product Owner.

In my role as an Agile coach and Scrum trainer, I get the chance to talk to a lot of Scrum Masters and teams.

Hard to believe but we have only two weeks left in our Scrummer quiz. But still two more chances to win a copy of Software in 30 Days, authored and autographed by Ken Schwaber himself.

I recently performed an organizational agile assessment and learned a great deal about how they served their customer’s technology needs. We investigated their technical practices, processes to develop and release, but also dug deep into how the people worked together from the people side of things.