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 Scru...

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 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 challen...

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 believ...

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 cha...

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.

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

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 ...

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 tackl...

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. Since Scrum is an intentionally incomplete framework with a reasonable yet short “manual,” this effect should not surprise anyone. For example, the Developers are ignoring a capacity c...

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 g...

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...

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 frame...

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-softwar...

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 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 ...

In this Unstuck 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 c...

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 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 lacklus...

(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.

Let me share some of the controversial findings and discussions with you. As always, there are no simple answers in complex environments.

The term 'Scrum Master' seems to have been around as long as Scrum. But has it? In this article I talk about where the term came from and why it was initially used.

Why hire a professional Scrum Master? They cost extra and you can always get one of the developers to do the work, part-time. Big saving, right? Not so much. Here's why.

The Applying Professional Scrum class is frequently overlooked when it comes to public classes.  People tend to go for the Professional Scrum Master class or the Professional Scrum Product Owner class instead.  And those are really great classes.  That is… they’re great for those who already have an...

When you first start to use Scrum you will need to decide which day to start your first Sprint, and there will be implications to that decision. Here are some possibilities and their implications to help you make the best decision.

All elements of the Scrum framework play a role in enabling empirical process control. Sprint Goal is a commitment that reinforces empiricism, however, it remains a part of Scrum which often is being neglected or causes challenges to many Scrum Teams.

In a recent episode of Your Daily Scrum, Professional Scrum Trainers Todd Miller and Ryan Ripley address a general question in Scrum circles: How Do You Increase the Velocity of a Scrum Team?

Agile isn’t the right fit for every business problem–it’s simply a tool in the toolkit–one of many.

Many Scrum Teams make use of Velocity. In the right hands, it's an incredibly useful measure. In the wrong hands, it can become a tool of obfuscation and even oppression.

In a recent class, a student asked, “What are the common difficulties teams face when starting with Agile?”  To  answer this question, I refer to the Tuckman Model of group development. Psychologist Bruce Tuckman discussed team performance in his 1965 paper, Developmental Sequence in Small Groups...

Have you ever completed a multi-billion-dollar project only to see it blow up in your face?  Twice?  If you answered yes, you’re in good company with the Galactic Empire.  The Rebel Alliance destroyed two Death Stars as well as their successor, the Starkiller Base, using similar tactics.  If the ...