Have you heard the term “lamp post metric”? [i] This is a measurement that is easy to gather and may even seem like common sense. If you lose something on a dark night, where are you going to look?

In the previous 3 articles on the Agile Metrics topic, I reviewed some of the most important Agile metrics that ActionableAgile software helps you to get with ease. Here we take a look at the ways the software can help you in forecasting your work.

In the first part of Getting to 85 – Agile Metrics with ActionableAgile we looked at the Cycle Time Scatterplot created by ActionableAgile software. The second part was all about the CFD. Now it's time to look at the Aging Work in Progress chart.

This question "What is the duration of a Sprint" is seemingly simple, but depending on the interviewing situation, company, interviewer, and their familiarity with Scrum you might need to give them more or less details and answer additional questions your answer might bring up.

In this webinar, Dave West, CEO & Product Owner, Scrum.org and Stefan Wolpers, Founder, Age of Product, explore the results including salary trends and agile adoption patterns, while also exploring gender equality within the Scrum Master role. They provide insights on what the results of this surve...

In today’s complex ever-changing work, we need to make full use of the collective intelligence of the whole team, even if the whole organization to be able to solve and deliver on these needs.

Scrum and Kanban are a great combination. With this insight more and more Scrum Teams become aware of terms and phrases used in Kanban. Like 'WIP'.

As a Professional Scrum Trainer for Scrum.org I get to think about the Definition of "Done" and its meaning a lot.

In this episode of Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer, PST Russell Miller will answers Scrum questions from the audience.

A few days ago, I was observing a Sprint Retrospective. The Scrum Team decided to work on the Definition of Done (DoD), identified as the most important topic to adapt for the next Sprint. The discussions were open and animated, when an unexpected discussion emerged during the session.

There has been so much written about Velocity and its impact on teams yet it is one metric that eludes everyone and keeps cropping up whenever there is discussion around productivity.

Hearing a senior executive announce "We're committed to becoming agile!" is not the bombshell moment it used to be. It no longer indicates a personal revelation or board-room epiphany.

The 2019 Scrum Master Trends Report by Scrum.org and the State of Agile 2018 shows numbers that provide insight in the maturity of agile adoptions.

The Scrum Team consists of accountabilities devides over three roles. The only three roles needed in Scrum. But all needed! And all equally important to be successful. If we would practice Scrum within our companies the way described in this way we can all be successful in delivering incremental val...

The purpose of Scrum is to create a potentially releasable Done Product Increment, in order to realize business value. Many teams struggle in improving their Definition of Done. The technique described here allows for greater transparency on what the Definition of Done is, and what the next steps ar...

Questions about agile certifications (especially those from Scrum.org) are an integral part of my routine. People always come to me saying that they are going to act as a Scrum Master / Product Owner / Developer on an agile project and they want to know what to study and what's the best first certif...

In this webinar, Dave West, CEO and Product Owner, Scrum.org and Wouter Aghina, a partner in the McKinsey & Company Amsterdam office explore the key attributes companies should be looking for when developing agile teams and share real-life examples of how pinpointing these traits and values can fost...

Struggling to integrate UX Designers into Scrum? Use these actions to make Scrum teams more user-centric and UX Designers full-time members of the Scrum Team!

Download this datasheet to learn more about the Professional Scrum with User Experience (PSU) class.

This blog post is about what I learned working with my team as a Scrum Master and improved between one year using Professional Scrum with Kanban.

Scrum is easy to understand, yet difficult to master. The Scrum Guide says so and it's true. If you have worked with Scrum in your organization you probably recognize it also. It's not difficult to start with Scrum.

Ahead of Agile for Automotive, this is an interview with Dave West and Professional Scrum Trainer Nigel Thurlow, Chief of Agile, Toyota.

Scrum is intended as a simple, yet sufficient framework for complex product delivery. Scrum is not a one-size-fits-all solution, a silver bullet or a complete methodology.

In this edition of Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer, PST Wilbert Seele answered some tough Scrum questions from the audience.

In this little blog I share some tips for multi-team Product Backlog refinement. What is Product Backlog Refinement? Product Backlog Refinement (PBR) is an activity that Scrum Teams regularly do to clarify potential upcoming Product Backlog Items (PBI). In single team Scrum, typically the Scru...

In this blog post, we describe how to use Conversation Cafe, as a Liberating Structure, within Scrum.

As people become more empowered and capable of taking ownership of their process and executing on their decisions, the next area to focus is raising the bar. This is about a drive for continuous improvement. It will be demonstrated with valuable outcomes, higher quality, and growth in the capabili...

The 2019 Scrum Master Trends Report is an update to the 2017 Scrum Master Salary Report that Age of the Product conducted in 2017. By partnering, we have secured a larger sample and broadened the reach of the research, growing from over 500 to more than 2,100 respondents and adding more geographies ...

The 2019 Scrum Master Trends Report is based on a 2018 survey of over 2100 participants, with a focus on trends useful to both new and experienced Scrum Masters.

In this webinar, Nic Easton, Nexus Scrum Master, Net Health, and Patricia Kong, Product Owner of Enterprise Solutions, Scrum.org walk through how they worked together to help Net Health address these challenges using Evidence-Based Management (EBM), a framework by Scrum.org that helps organizations ...

Hello, great people of the world. Welcome back to the Scrum Master blog series with yours truly. As we enter the new year, we are seeing Scrum becoming the most commonly used framework to manage complex product delivery in the industry.

In my career, I have had the great privilege to witness different companies undergo many different phases of agile transformations. I’ve met many amazing Scrum Masters along the way that have evolved to take on major responsibilities in their organizations.

Dave West, Product Owner of Scrum.org, co-authored a paper in collaboration with McKinsey about favorable personally traits for team members in agile teams. In this episode of the Agile.FM Podcast with Joe Krebs, receive confirmation about some well known facts such as handling ambiguity but also so...

Scrum stands on the three legs of transparency, inspection, and adaptation. Of these, transparency can arguably be said to come first. Unless a situation is made clear it cannot be inspected, and any consequent adaptation arising therefrom is likely to prove futile.

In this episode of Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer, PST Martijn van Asseldonk answered the pressing Scrum questions of the audience.

This is the third post in a series on tools for Scrum Masters and their teams.

Scrum is simple to understand. The Scrum Guide is just 19 pages. Over the years, I've met many Scrum practitioners who have never read the Scrum Guide or they have read it once and once only. I believe there's something special about the Scrum Guide and because of this, it's important that we consid...

When practicing the guitar, there have been times when I got very demotivated and frustrated until I found out I was focusing on my mistakes instead of enjoying all the good licks I was producing on my guitar as well. I learned that focusing on the good things I play makes practicing the guitar much...

A couple of months ago I blogged about some of the tools and toys that live in the trunk of my car. I take these along everywhere I teach and coach. Since posting, people have suggested additional items that just must be in my toolbox.

Now that we’ve covered the essentials of self-organization and intrinsic motivation, let’s dive into how you make decisions that enable and empower others.

About 40 people gathered at the nlScrum meetup dedicated to physical and digital tools for the agile workspace. Tools that help developers, coaches and trainers to survive in the toughest environments.

The Scrum framework deliberately leaves the manager role out, thus allowing business to structure and organize how it sees fit. 

Once you have started to create a strong foundation, the second action of an effective servant-leader is to empower and enable others.

A real-estate software company went through an Evidence-Based Management (EBM) workshop with Professional Scrum Trainer Ravi Verma. Upon implementing EBM they learned how to measure the value of their work and drove its largest revenue growth in 10 years.

The Development Team is both self-organizing and cross-functional and by the end of each Sprint provides an increment that is ‘done’ and releasable. The team defines how to organize work in a Sprint.

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainers Hiren and Punit Doshi provide some examples of impediments that they have run into while working on Scrum Teams and ways that they went about handling them. They also investigate how a Scrum Master can help the Development Team deal with potent...

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Jeff Bubolz provides some tips from his experience working to deliver a product with multiple Scrum Teams. Jeff discusses Product Ownership, Backlogs, Daily Scrums and more. (5:41 Minutes)

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Krystian Kaczor discusses the purpose that the Nexus Integration Team plays when scaling Scrum beyond 2 Scrum Teams to deliver an integrated product. (4:43 Minutes)

This case study follows the journey of Akbank, one of Turkey's largest banking organizations. They started their journey in 2010 and now have grown to have 950 people and 143 Scrum Teams.

Most organizations are using Scrum, however, many of them feel like the agility of their organization has degraded, and they might be right! Often, using Scrum starts out as a way to improve development efforts coordinated within an IT division or department, but that is not the most effective organ...