In this episode of Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer, PST Reggie Gardner answers Scrum questions from the audience.

The Scrum Master is often expected to facilitate and animate every Scrum events. But, according to the Scrum Guide, the role of the Scrum Master regarding the different events is to ensure that the event takes place and that attendants understand its purpose.

This article provides five examples of how Liberating Structures are valuable for Scrum Masters.

A Sprint Goal is an objective set for the Sprint that can be met through the implementation of Product Backlog (cit. Scrum Guide). Have you clearly defined a Sprint Goal at the end of your Sprint Planning? Is this Sprint Goal understandable and transparent to everyone? Is it defined in a way that...

Scrum Masters are often understood mostly as “team coaches”. Yet, their role is vastly more important. The Scrum Guide emphasizes that Scrum Masters are responsible for leading and coaching organizations in the adoption of Scrum and causing change that increases the productivity of the Scrum Team.

I collected lots of feedback from different students around Europe that attended my Professional Scrum Developer Training. Here some photos to give you an idea...

In your organization, some problems seem to recur, they are difficult to fix using the tools, tricks and practices you developed over the years as a manager. Maybe this problem is different and the perspective of an expert-outsider might help?

In this article I will stress again the utmost importance of understanding the context of the organization as a strategy to achieve a possible, evolutionary and deep application of Scrum within organizations.

In this short Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Jasper Alblas talks about what a Scrum Master does and doesn't do. (1:37 Minutes)

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Ravi Verma describes a Sprint Retrospective in Scrum, giving tips for ways to make them valuable and how he has improved them over time. (6:02 Minutes)

I always assume that the people I work with are professionals - and not children. This is why I don’t like maturity models in whatever shape or form. And we’ve got a lot of those in our industry.

Ever wonder what a Scrum Master does all day? If you’re new to the role of a Scrum Master, you might think you have to facilitate all the events, take notes and schedule outlook meetings. Turns out you don’t have to do any of that!

Quite a few teams in organizations implementing Scrum depict their frustration in statements like “Scrum is driving us crazy!”, “It’s too chaotic!”

In this podcast, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods at InfoQ, spoke to Dave West, CEO and Product Owner at Scrum.org about the current state of Scrum and the latest initiatives by Scrum.org.

In this presentation from Agile India 2019, Professional Scrum Trainer Mia Horrigan discusses Evidence-Based Management and how this empirical process can help agile transformations measure and manage the value derived from their transformation initiative. (38:33 Minutes)

This is a video recording of Professional Scrum Trainer Mia Horrigan's presentation at Agile India titled,"Accelerate Improvements Through Retrospectives," where she discusses some Retrospective patterns that she has found useful. (41:13 Minutes)

In this webinar, UX experts and co-authors of Lean UX, Jeff Gothelf and Joshua Seiden, along with Professional Scrum Trainer Gary Pedretti, discuss the focuses of PSU and share tips and techniques on how Scrum Teams can integrate UX practices into their work.

The comparison between Kanban and Scrum obviously comes up often when we're talking to teams, especially in the context of Professional Scrum with Kanban. While they are more similar than many practitioners realize, one key difference is the perspective on Teams. 

I was working with various groups over the last year and noticed some commonalities in the problems they faced. In this blog I want to share some common collaboration problems and solutions I experimented with.

The House of Scrum metaphor and sketch seemed to have piqued some interest last year. In this video I go over the 3-5-3 framework, giving a high level overview of Scrum..

People may have talked about these things earlier and I would like to share my experience around it. This story is long dated back when I was working on a software product for a manufacturing domain client.

Many large legacy organizations are moving toward agile delivery methods in hopes of releasing faster to market. Based on my experiences, they look at it solely from a production view of getting software released faster and more often. This view has them believing this will result in getting more fe...

Through my professional experience, while serving my customers, working with Scrum Teams and training people in Professional Scrum, I have observed that some Scrum Masters only work to serve the Development Team and the Product Owner.

Ask any Agile practitioner these days what Agile values are and he/she, most likely, will recite you some lines from the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.

As many Professional Scrum Trainers have experienced, there is always a good discussion around the Sprint Goal. A similar discussion recently led me to address this not so well understood aspect.

One of the most important things we can do to help individuals and teams improve is coach them to embrace the agile mindset. The Manifesto for Agile Software Development provides values and principles to help guide teams in navigating the complexities of product delivery.

Building (and hiring) a great team takes time and effort. Patrick Lencioni’s “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” became a staple reading in an Agile community these days.

A common phrase that I use in my classes is that Scrum is like the poker game Texas Hold’em; it only takes a few minutes to learn but a lifetime to master.  The “few minutes” may be a bit of a stretch but my students get the point. 

What is Scrum Team Velocity? This is a tricky one, and you need to be answering it in the context of the organization you are interviewing with and its complementary practices.

Professional Scrum Trainer (PST) Gary Pedretti (@garypedretti) and User Experience expert Jeff Gothelf (@jboogie) joined Ryan Ripley on the Agile for Humans Podcast (@ryanripley) to discuss how UX/UI designers can effectively work with Scrum Teams.

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...

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!

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...

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.