Community Blog

The Professional Scrum Master I from Scrum.org is a challenging online assessment where you’ll answer 80 multiple choice questions within an hour.

Usually conversation between developers and Product Owner goes around acceptance criteria just to negotiate scope of requirements for one user story, but knowledge and context are not conveyed in the same structured way. User Story Canvas can help Scrum Team to fix these problems by focusing team to confirm more complex aspects.

In my 100th episode of Agile.FM,  I had the opportunity to speak with Jim Benson, the co-creator of Lean Coffee.

A few weeks ago, I had a wonderful conversation with Diana Larsen on Agile FM, and it did not come as a surprise, that the topic of retrospectives came up. Diana is the co-author of the book Agile Retrospectives , which has been very influential in many agile careers, including mine. 

The premise of Lean Coffee is relatively straight forwarded. Like-minded people that want to create or discuss something they care about use this tool to organize their conversations.

One of the topics that often is unclear when starting with Scrum. You can teach ‘what’ it is. Sometimes it helps to point north to ‘why’ we do refinement. Good facilitation skills definitely help during refinement as well as a toolbox of structures and techniques will help with the ‘how’.

Lean Coffee is a powerful meeting faciliation technique that can be used in coffee shops, conferences, open space, Scrum events or simply replace existing corporate meeting formats.

As Scrum Trainer I get to meet a lot of teams and hear of many different ways to do Scrum. Most are valid ways, yet some seem more aligned with the values of Scrum or the purpose of the specific Scrum Element.

Katas and patterns go hand in hand and so does the Agile Transformation Kata (ATK) harmonize very well with the organizational change patterns published for example by Mary Lynn Manns and Linda Rising in their book  More Fearless Change.

We recently introduced our latest retrospective technique called Scrum Value Pairs, which helps Scrum teams improve areas of their process in regards to the 5 Scrum Values.

Imagine for a moment what frequently asked questions around agile transformations look like. Which questions do you hear most often as it seems agile transformation has been a hot topic lately?

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.

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.

Velocity, as a metric used by some Scrum teams, is rife with trouble. David's concise article highlights a common pitfall.

This article on Product Backlog refinement shows that Refinement is more than just a meeting where the whole Scrum Team is having a discussion. It requires and involves everyone with shared and special responsibilities.

As a trainer, I often get asked for real world examples of Scrum implementations. You can't get any more real world than how Francis and Sally live their lives through Scrum, as they look for a way to help with ADHD.

In every Scrum.org Professional Scrum Development class, we touch upon both technical and collaboration practices to help improve the development teams explore new options.

This is a great exercise to learn more about your team; to find out more about each other’s concerns and dreams and, importantly, what you can do to support them. 

Bottom line - Toyota Improvement and Coaching Kata is the perfect partner for flow-based retrospectives.

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.

A lack of defined engineering practices, standards and tooling is an often observed problem in software development, regardless of whether Scrum is used.

In his book Good to Great, author Jim Collins asks the reader:

File this one under: “how do you do Sprint Reviews when you have lots of teams?”  Indeed, the traditional presentation format gets long, boring, and ineffective when you have more than a handful of teams presenting at a Sprint Review.

Collaboration is the key to successful agile product development. A community of practice is a technique that helps us achieve this.