Community Blog

Many teams are finding that they need to adjust to a new reality amid the covid-19 pandemic. Strategic plans lie in tatters, urgent unplanned work fills the board, stakeholders are hammering teams with requests, and routine has gone out of the window. This is a time for a Scrum Master to be pragmatic, calm, and outcome focused: providing delivery leadership without allowing process to get in the way.

Facing the COVID-19 pandemic, we are all staying home for the safety of our people. This is a hard time for all of us. While classes are re-scheduled in the Fall, some of us Scrum trainers are refocusing our energy to help the household while others are investigating how to conduct interactive online training.

This fourth article now addresses basic remote agile anti-patterns — the pitfalls any distributed team wants to avoid to become successful.

Even though applying agile processes in that context is often a good and valuable idea, business agility is a much bigger term than that. It means how well an organization is equipped to react to market changes, merging customer needs or other factors that impact the business as a whole. 

Ever wonder how to get your first Scrum Master job with little to no experience? It’s a question I often get in my Professional Scrum classes.

Good Scrum Masters are passionate. Great Scrum Masters are dispassionate.

In my daily life as a Scrum Master, I witness many crazy situations. I want to share my discoveries via this comic series featuring Koos Coach, the silly Scrum Master struggling to understand and master Scrum.

In every Sprint, Sprint Retrospective is an excellent chance to inspect and adapt the way of working.

Watch the Replay of the Remote Agile Practices & Tools Live Virtual Class At the end of March, we ran a Remote Agile Practices & Tools class with about 30 participants from all over Europe, the Eastern Seaboard, and Canada.

Scrum.org CEO Dave West looks back at March and how the Scrum.org Community has rallied in the wake of COVID-19.

Every Sprint starts with a Sprint Planning event. It is very crucial to ensure that the Scrum Team comes to a shared understanding of what and how are they going to deliver a “Done” increment that creates maximum business impact.

While working remotely might feel good right now, we are up for trouble. Anxiety-invoked behavior and stress are likely to happen very soon. Let's discuss what is coming at us.

En la reunión del Manifiesto Ágil en 2001, se escribió un conjunto de 4 valores respaldados por una docena de principios. Esto era el inicio de lo que es Agile.

In this third post of the Remote Agile series, we address the tool at the heart of working with a distributed team as a Scrum Master, Agile Coach, or Product Owner: Zoom.

This is the first part of a blog series about product definition in Large Scale Scrum.

The Agile Transformation Kata is for example such a practice that reinforces an agile mindset during an agile transformation, and through many reflection cycles allows to adapt to new emerging needs, like COVID-19.

In today's vlog, I discuss about the differences between the Scrum Master and the Product Owner role.

The urgency of having the right type of conversation, especially today in a remote setting, has significantly increased overnight. This blog provides a perspective on a particular type of conversation and my own “personal experiences”  that show we need them more than ever.

See Robert (Robb) Pieper from Responsive Advisors give his talk "Your Agile Team Needs a Therapist" to an awesome group at Music City Agile 2017 in Nashville, TN.

This follow-up post now delves into virtual Liberating Structures, answering the question of how we can make use of the powerful toolbox of inclusive and collaborative practices in a remote setting.

Trying to make virtual meetings work with your team? We've made many mistakes in our virtual meetings over the years. In this post, we share our ten most helpful tips for having engaging and productive meetings online.

Completing an Agile Coaching certification doesn’t make you an Agile Coach. So where do you start and how do you chart your own journey?

Let's talk about behavior leaders need to exhibit in these difficult times.

In this post we show you an alternative Scrum Framework poster and explain why we chose to present some of the Scrum elements differently.

On November 22nd, 2019, I gave the closing keynote at Scrum Deutschland, a talk called ‘The Four Things You Do To Prevent Value Delivery.’

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.

In my daily life as a Scrum Master, I witness many crazy situations. I want to share my discoveries via this comic series featuring Koos Coach, the silly Scrum Master struggling to understand and master Scrum.

Interesting times have come. Due to danger of coronavirus spread many organizations decided to switch to the remote work model. Besides the influence on Scrum implementation, this might be a new situation for you personally.

Agile has always been about colocation, about direct communication, physical boards, and all the other haptic and analog moments to create value in the digital realm...

Recruiting a Scrum Master is simple and complex. There are plenty of “Scrum Masters”, but how do you know if the person you are hiring is a great Scrum Master? A solution needs to have 4 elements.

The Old Farmer’s Almanac is the oldest continuously published periodical in North America. It was first published in 1792 by Robert B. Thomas who wanted an almanac “to be useful with a pleasant degree of humor. Many long-time Almanac followers claim that its forecasts are 80% to 85% accurate. 

The article explores the primary causes of zombified interaction between Scrum Teams and stakeholders.

in today's vlog I am sharing with you how to use Scrum with Kanban.

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’.

Even if you don't know what the Scrum Framework is all about, or even if software development (and for that matter, any kind of product development) or delivery is not your area of work and have stumbled upon this blogpost while doing your research on COVID-19, I urge you to read on. 

What is a Product Owner? What are the differences between a Product Owner and Project Manager? Isn’t a Product Owner some kind of an Agile Project Manager? These are some of the questions we often get from people in our Scrum.org classes.

After covering the Scrum Master and the Product Owner, this article addresses Development Team anti-patterns, covering all Scrum Events as well as the Product Backlog artifact. Learn more about what to look out for if you want to support your fellow teammates.

The Sprint Goal is mentioned numerous times in the Scrum Guide, however it can be over looked by many teams or seen as an "oh yeah" moment when teams are finishing Sprint Planning.

Scrum is a simple framework that can quickly come apart if even one part of the framework is not being properly implemented. As a Professional Scrum Trainer for almost ten years and founder of Responsive Advisors...

The Scrum Team gathers around their team desk to hold the Daily Scrum.

In this article, we shall investigate why the learning and development of multi-functional specialists in Scrum is the core of organizational Agility and value optimization. Many Development Teams are not collaborating as real teams, but as a collection of narrow specialists focused on "their" tasks (QA, Backend, iOS, Android).

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.

Research suggests that reaching true mastery of a field requires 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. What exactly is needed to grow passion and perseverance to endure such an effort?

You must have heard about the Radical Candor book and its quadrant model. Today I want to talk about how you can apply this model to a Scrum Master role.

Not all Agile Training Courses are created equal and some are more effective then others. So what's the difference that makes the difference? And how can we get more from our training?

Este video refleja como un estudiante del Professional Scrum Master de Scrum.org es capaz de usar Scrum fuera de un contexto de software.

In this blog post, we explain the Liberating Structure ‘Simple Ethnography’. We clarify its purpose, the steps to facilitate it, our findings, and examples of using it with Scrum.

It really created the situation where we were able to have really honest conversations that have been suppressed before.

As a seasoned Scrum Master, you’ve probably already read every good book there is about Scrum. As you look to broaden your knowledge you may now find yourself craving something different.

The emergence of the Kanban Guide for Scrum teams has given new metrics and practices to Development Teams on how they can augment their Sprint Backlog to manage their work.