Resources

The 2020 Scrum Guide provides only the necessary guidelines within which teams use Scrum to deliver value. Sometimes, myths about the guidelines of the Scrum framework can result in teams adopting practices which do not add value to the Scrum Team. By exposing these myths, you can help accelerate the delivery of value for your team. In this webinar, Professional Scrum Trainer Mary Iqbal will discuss some of the most common myths about Scrum and how to correct them!

In this webinar, Professional Scrum Trainer Ravi Verma shares seven concrete steps that purpose-driven Scrum Masters can take to avoid and escape this trap while reclaiming their Scrum Master superpower.

How to Fail as an Agile Coach in Scrum by Scrum.org trainer Chee-Hong Hsia.  ​​​​​​​Helping organisations in their Agile journey sustainably while respecting the three Scrum accountabilities. A must-read if you're a dedicated Agile Coach or working with Agile Coaches in your organisation where Scrum is being adopted.

Every Scrum Team, at some point, will struggle with how to facilitate the Daily Scrum. By using a Kanban Board and Flow Metrics, Scrum Teams can better collaborate on their work, visualize progress towards the Sprint Goal, and form the best plan possible for the day.

In tis blog post, Professional Scrum Trainer Venkatesh Rajamani walks through challenges Scrum Masters face and how to resolve them.

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Richard Hundhausen talks about his experience as a Developer and the difficulties that he and others have faced when moving to becoming a Scrum Master. Richard provides guidance and suggestions of what to look out for and how to overcome challenges. (5:24 Minutes)

Did you join the meeting to find out the solutions, but no one has a new idea? Your Scrum Team has NO innovative ideas to solve the customer problems in many Sprints? Nowadays, innovations, new values are the key to success. Customers always want more of what they had and look for the news overate ideas. Therefore, the organization can't continue bringing new value to customers, can't be led, and gives the space for those who have the innovation to lead the market.

The Canvas plays the role of a guide for the Team Coaches. The coaches can follow the guidelines of the Canvas and partner with their teams and their stakeholders to maximise the required abilities to move forward successfully, achieving the shared goals.

Scrum has proven time and again to be the most popular framework for software development. Given that software is eating the world, a seasoned Scrum Master is nowadays in high demand. And that demand causes the market entry of new professionals from other project management branches, probably believing that reading one or two Scrum books will be sufficient. Which makes any Scrum Master interview a challenging task. A good starting point, though, is to ask a candidate to walk in the shoes of an imaginary opponent trying to make the Scrum Master fail by culturally accepted means.

This vlog talks about how Scrum Master is not analogous with parent.

In this blog, I will share my valuable experience in my journey toward becoming a Scrum Master. I would also share stories of various professionals, including women, who successfully got a Scrum Master’s job even after a career break. 

Words matter, especially when working in any team setting. Words that are spoken or written by one person can have different meanings when read or heard by another. Scrum Teams have multiple members, which means the interpretation of words used in the team setting increases with each member. The chances of misinterpretation also increases. Shared understanding among members is needed to reduce complexity and provide greater clarity. So the need for a "common language" becomes critical to produce value every Sprint. Create your own playbook to help your teams and organization develop their "common language". In this Scrum Pulse webinar, Professional Scrum Trainer John Riley  demonstrates some theory and components behind a "common language". Words and phrases become less about jargon and more about shared understanding. You will also see some techniques to use in developing a team's common language, and how this language helps a team create artifacts. Some of these artifacts include Product Goals, team agreements, and Product Backlog Items.

Scrum.org PST Chee-Hong Hsia is here to set the record straight. It’s actually a huge compliment when people say "You’re a Scrum purist".

In this blog, Venkatesh Rajamani shares tips on being a good Scrum Master.

Many well-meaning Scrum practitioners have misconceptions about Scrum, which sometimes leads to creating “rules” that do not exist in the framework. In today's article, we will discuss the five of the most common misconceptions about the Sprint.

So there is Scrum and there is 'an implementation of Scrum'. Why is it important to understand the difference? I hope that after reading this blog, you will realise that many Scrum conversations are actually not about Scrum, but "an implementation of Scrum" and you didn't even realise it.

How does your Increment support adaptation in order to minimise deviations from agreed goals? Each of the Scrum Artifacts serve to adapt. So does the Increment. Check it out!

Familiarize yourself with the principles of Liberating Structures and learn how they can strengthen your Scrum Team.

How does your Sprint Backlog support adaptation in order to minimise deviations from agreed goals? Each of the Scrum Artifacts serve to adapt. So does the Sprint Backlog. Check it out!

A common question we get asked is how do we get started with creating a Definition of Done? Let's explore how we can obtain transparency of where you are, your destination should be, and what your possible first steps are to get there!

In this special episode of Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer moderated by Patricia Kong, PSTs Magdalena Firlit, Simon Flossmann, Ravi Verma and Yuval Yeret, answer questions related to Scaling Scrum. They provide insights on scaling Scrum with Nexus and also answer questions related to comparing and choosing scaling frameworks.

Read on and learn more on how to best sabotage a Scrum Master from the exercise results of more than ten PSM I and PSM II classes. (I slightly edited the suggestions for better readability.)

Last week, we talked about common misconceptions related to the Daily Scrum.  This week we’ll focus more broadly on misconceptions impacting everything from the Product Backlog to the composition of the Scrum Team itself.  

There’s been plenty of discussion over the years comparing and contrasting Scrum and Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), which has set up a premise that you must choose one or the other. But in actuality, Scrum and SAFe can be friends and work well together. This whitepaper by Avanade and Scrum.org tackles this.

In my recent post, I told the story of the time I was fired as a Scrum Master. This time I will tell you about a time I decided to quit (probably shortly before I would have been fired!).

TL; DR: Ignoring the Capacity Check during Sprint Planning There are plenty of failure possibilities with Scrum.

Many self-managing teams struggle to reach a truly high-performing state. When an organisation moves to a self-management model, a key service centralised management traditionally played – giving feedback – is often ignored, leaving teams struggling to truly grow. In this article, we share how to give effective feedback to improve both team and individual performance.

A culture of feedback is a critical element of an adaptive organisation. While people have talked about how to give effective feedback, little has been said on how to receive it, until now.

It might surprise you that even those with years of Scrum practice sometimes make statements about the framework that are, well, inaccurate. The Scrum Guide outlines how teams can learn to work together to deliver complex work. It’s not a how-to list of instructions, and perhaps that’s what leads to misinterpretation.  Last week, we discussed some of the most common, if well-meaning, misconceptions about Scrum in general.  Today, we’ll dive further into this topic with a focus on the Daily Scrum event.

Many people ask whether a Scrum Master is part of Daily Scrum. We know that the Scrum Guide tells us that Daily Scrum is for the Developers by the Developers. Scrum Master has nothing to do there and if they do attend, it might be a sign of Zombie Scrum.

How does your Sprint Retrospective support adaptation in order to minimise deviations from agreed goals? Each of the Scrum Events serves to adapt. So does the Sprint Retrospective. Check it out!

Want fabulous teams that build great products? Great teams don’t happen by accident. And they don’t have to take a long time to build. Learn more from Richard Kasperowski on employing core protocols for psychological safety and emotional intelligence from this Hands-on Agile session.

In this Scrum Pulse webinar, Professional Scrum Trainer Mary Iqbal discusses the common signs of pretending to be agile and how you can use Empiricism to stop pretending.

​​​​​​​According to the 15th annual State of Agile Report, there has been a tremendous increase in the adoption of agile frameworks this year.  Within software teams, agile adoption grew from 37% in 2020 to 86% in 2021.  This rapid growth undoubtedly means many individuals working within agile frameworks have not undertaken formal training in it.  It’s the perfect environment for misinformation to spread.  Below are a few of the most common misconceptions about Scrum.  

In this episode of Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer, PSTs John Riley and Ben Thorp answer questions related to regulating workflow effectively and developing a test-first mindset. They provide insight on practices and techniques useful to kickstarting continuously delivering software and non-software products.

Is your preferred approach to starting an Agile "Transformation" sending a bunch of worker-bees to Agile Training and then waiting for the magic to happen?

As long as the Scrum team has the drive to learn and to run experiments to figure out what works for them, Zombie Scrum (or fake Agile) won’t find futile ground and can’t take root!

There are a lot of high expectations associated with implementation of Scrum. They are often related to delivery and are based on some popular misconceptions about agility. For example, "Scrum helps teams deliver more faster".

There is a lot going on when it comes to delivering complex products in an uncertain and constantly changing world. In this webinar, Scrum.org Professional Scrum Trainer Stephanie Ockerman breaks it down to 5 ways Scrum Teams can discover their opportunities to improve the many different aspects of their process.

In this Unstuck Careers Leadership Moment, PST Mark Wavle explores one of the challenges that many servant leaders face.

Iterative, incremental delivery is critical to a successful Agile team.  Without it, Agile is really just window dressing.  Here are five examples that attempt to illustrate the concept of iterative, incremental delivery in a single image.  No example is perfect.  Let me know what you think in the comments and if you have another way to explain these concepts.

In a recent episode of Your Daily Scrum, Professional Scrum Trainers Todd Miller and Ryan Ripley teach you the Scrum Framework in 7 minutes!

In today's vlog, PST Joshua Partogi will show you how your Scrum Team can save time and make a forecast during Sprint Planning with #NoEstimates & Kanban metrics.

​​​​​​​The Sprint Review meeting is one of the Product Owner’s most important events.  But even the most important events can become a little stale over time.  Here are five ideas to spice up your Sprint Review meeting. 

In this Unstuck Careers Leadership Moment, PST Mark Wavle explores the question, "How do I help an unmotivated team?"

The 2020 version of the Scrum Guide dropped the classic “three questions” of the Daily Scrum. Yet many teams stick with the practice, even when it doesn’t produce the collaboration that is the hallmark of a valuable Daily Scrum. When a Scrum Team I worked with said that their Daily Scrum was lackluster and unproductive, I challenged them to design a better one. The new pattern we created shifted the focus from individual action to team collaboration toward the Sprint Goal.

In my latest video, I’m sharing a useful model that can help you better serve your Scrum Team and set them up for success.

(And that should benefit experienced Scrum Masters too)

TL; DR: My Top Ten Worst Scrum Anti-Patterns I recently was invited to a Scrum.org Webinar, and I picked a topic close to my heart: the worst Scrum anti-patterns.

How can the Scrum Master detect undesirable variances in progress towards agreed goals? Each of the Scrum accountabilities participates in one or more inspections. So does the Scrum Master. Check out our tips!