Community Blog

If there is one trend that has surpassed Agile in our profession over the last five years, I would say DevOps would be a good culprit. As we’ve seen an explosion of tools to implement CI/CD in our Scrum teams, we’ve also seen some of our Agile practices being challenged by this new reality.

The other day I had a conversation with a colleague. He was looking for an opener for a talk - something catchy to illustrate to his audience (mostly finance and banking) that there could well be a need to change their current ways of working.

Recently I ran into a beautiful piece of text, written by Rachel Naomi Remin. In this text I read the following phrase:"Perhaps the secret of living well is not in having all the answers, but in pursuing unanswerable questions in good company"

In today's vlog, I share what is the Product Owner role is about and what is the broad accountabilities of the Product Owner.

Not all companies need to be agile companies. What does it really mean to be an agile organization and how do you know if you need to be one? Watch this short 4 minute episode of Responsive Advisors Agile B-Sides video blog to find out!

Software and online-services companies are undergoing quick implementation of the Scrum framework in their Products. Scrum is a process framework that enables deliver complex products iteratively and incrementally while controlling the risk.

This blog post gives you an overview of the paper "Liberating Structures - an Antidote to Zombie Scrum". It describes what Zombie Scrum is about and offers tangible examples of how to recognize, treat, and prevent Zombie Scrum by using Liberating Structures.

The other day, I picked up my son from soccer and he had a huge smile on his face. I asked him how it was and he answered with an even bigger smile “Awesome!”.

On November 22nd, 2019, I gave the closing keynote at Scrum Deutschland, a talk called 'The Four Things You Do To Prevent Value Delivery'. In this keynote, I discussed the trends I found during my research at multiple organizations.

I’ve been teaching the class Professional Scrum with Kanban (PSK) for the last year now and I strongly believe parts of its content will send some of our current practices and books to the Agile museum.

Outcome mapping enhances Product Backlog transparency by making transparent the relationships between goals, stakeholders, behaviors and outputs built by a Development Team.

Last week, about 30 members of the Hands-on Agile community in Berlin came together to identify opportunities for personal and professional growth for the coming year, using Liberating Structures’ Ecocycle Planning in the process, to further your Scrum Master career 2020.

Can anyone be a Product Owner (PO)? What’s the best position in the company to fill that role? With Scrum you have one and only one Product Owner for a given product...

Hello awesome people. Today I want to share with you my personal guidelines that I have been using to recruit/hire Scrum Masters from the job market.

What baffles me each time I look at the numbers with regards to Scrum certifications, is the low amount of PSD Certified Software Developers in relation to the certified Product Owners and Scrum Masters out there.

Some people just happen to learn more from short movie clips. And they can be a great way to bring some humor in. Also available as a Youtube Playlist.

Scrum Master anti-patterns: The reasons why Scrum Masters violate the spirit of the Scrum Guide are multi-faceted. They run from ill-suited personal traits and the pursuit of individual agendas to frustration with the team itself.

Sir Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, and Nikola Tesla; this woman and these gentlemen are considered to be some of the greatest scientists of all time.

Earlier this year, we had released the complimentary Scrum Poster and the response was way beyond positive. We love that teams around the world use the poster to make Scrum transparent.

Nearly every conversation I have with people who are trying to bring agility to their organizations eventually comes around to the challenge of changing the culture of the organization.

In this blog, Professional Scrum Trainer Magdalena Firlit talks about some of the differences in words between English and the Slavic languages with helpful tips for translations when it comes to Professional Scrum certification assessments.

The Clerk is your personal waiter for all your user story serving. Gathering all the wishes, user stories and demands is what The Clerk does.

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.

Liberating Structures are a very popular toolkit for Scrum Masters these days. Conferences, trainings and meetings make heavy use of them. Of course Liberating Structures also find their way into the Scrum events, for very good reasons.

Hello awesome people. How was your week so far? I hope you are having an awesome week. In this vlog, I will be sharing a light introduction about coaching mainly within the context of Scrum framework.

Some of the most famous and influential leaders of all times include people like Mohandas K. Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln.

What event could better embody Scrum’s principle of empiricism than the Sprint Retrospective? I assume all peers agree that even the simplest retrospective—if only held regularly—is far more useful than having a fancy one once in a while, not to mention having none at all.

The Manager is concerned with the wellbeing of the Scrum Team. The Manager loves to see happy, engaged and motivated people. (S)he loves it when people are developing themselves, learning new skills, obtaining new knowledge and making mistakes.

How to use "Visible Status" with the information radiator to help the call to action? How to use explicit indicators to make decisions?

I will make a case why the Sprint Goal should take center stage in any Sprint. If it seems difficult, it is an opportunity to improve.

We all know them; Tiger Woods, Christiano Ronaldo, Rafael Nadal, and LeBron James. Some of the best sports players in the world and they are all recognized for their great individual performance as an athlete.

The Project Manager is typically concerned with day-to-day progress of the Development Team.

Decision Maker, which helps the stakeholders and Scrum Team to keep time-to-market short, by keeping decision-making time short.

The Customer Representative Product Owner is the go-to person for people in the organization who want to gain a understanding of what customers (and/or users) are looking for in the product or service which the Product Owner is responsible for.

The Gatekeeper is the single point of contact between the Scrum Team and the outside world. The Gatekeeper tends to block all connections between the Development Team and its stakeholders; all communication goes through him/her.

Is Product Owner accountable for Return on Investment (ROI)? The answer is YES, The Product Owner is accountable for ROI.

The Subject Matter Expert or SME is the expert in telling you how stuff works. Product Owners that favor this stance are a blessing and a curse.

Visionary Product Owners are people like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Thomas Edison and Winston Churchill.

You’ve met them: slightly curved back, eyes glued to the screen, minimized font size and a 14 step template in Jira. Story, check. Acceptance criteria check. Examples, check. Logfiles, hmm still have to run that query.

This week we witnessed the launch event of the Scrum.org Professional Scrum Product Owner-Advanced class, and we could not be more excited about it. Finally, we are free to tell everyone about the best training we’ve ever created.

With the launch of a brand-new Product Owner-Advanced class (including certification) coming up, we want to introduce you to some new and unpublished content: The Stances of the Product Owner. In this article, we’ll share an overview of both the preferred and the misunderstood Stances of the Product Owner. In upcoming articles, we’ll do a deep dive into each of the Stances individually.

Finally, it’s here! An advanced and certified Professional Scrum Product Owner-Advanced class, with PSPO-II certification! After months working in secret, we can now share the journey that Chris Lukassen and I had in creating this advanced Product Owner class.

TL; DR: The Agile Metrics Survey 2020 Let’s stop guessing and start crowdsourcing data and information on this critical topic: Who is using what metrics under which context to what success?

Hey everyone. How has your week been going? We are entering summer here in Perth. And in today's vlog, I'd like to share with you how to evaluate the Scrum Master's performance.

Scrum.org offers different courses to provide you the best learning experience based on your focus of Scrum. The variety of courses makes choosing the best course difficult sometimes. This blog post provides guidelines to help you choose between the Professional Scrum Foundations (PSF) course and the Professional Scrum Master (PSM) course.

Scrum requires a self-organized team to deliver "done" increments at the end of each Sprint. This peculiarity sometimes raises criticisms and questions when it is discussed in trainings or when coaching the clients: how can a team work without a leader? How are we going to do our job, if no one tells us what or how to do it?

Somewhere between the CEO and 1st line management level, "you do Scrum, just get it done, how much money you need, and what kind of people you need."  "It's just another framework." Salespeople were saying, "you're doing Scrum magic and making it faster." Sometimes people don't want to change.

Hello awesome people. It's me again with new learnings from the trenches. In our Professional Scrum Master and Professional Scrum Master II classes, we talk about several stances that the Scrum Master uses to improve organisation agility to deliver valuable products. 

Are we still on the right track? Answering this question in a collaborative effort of the Scrum Team as well as internal (and external) stakeholders is the purpose of the Sprint Review. Given its importance, it is worthwhile to tackle the most common Sprint Review anti-patterns.

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.