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 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 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 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.

In the last decade, we have realized that we cannot plan all up front in a linear process to develop software. We are solving complex problems, which require us to use an empirical process, lean UX practices, and a supporting technology platform that allows us to build, measure, learn and apply the ...

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 January 2019 I was at Prowareness in Delft, Holland, and attended the 2 day Professional Product Owner course delivered by Ralph Jocham, co-author of The Professional Product Owner book. I thought I'd share my thoughts on the course with you.

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 ...

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Chuck Suscheck discusses some ideas that he has learned when building software over the years on how to make decisions on prioritization, especially as they impact architecture and design. (3:21 minutes)

McKinsey & Company and Scrum.org conducted a joint study exploring the values and traits that make agile teams successful, helping to guide companies with concepts and ways to better recruit and coach their teams. This report summarizes the findings.

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...

A discussion is raging among Project Managers about the Iron Triangle because the authors of Scrum say “Scrum breaks the Iron Triangle”.

Why would Product Owners prevent value delivery, you ask? They shouldn’t, and don’t want to, but yet I see them do it every day. And usually, it’s without them even knowing they’re doing it. Here’s four observations of how Product Owners prevent value delivery, and suggestions to improve.

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.

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...

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. 

In this episode of Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer, PST Chad Beier hosted an interactive Q&A session on how to rationalize your demand (where the work comes from) and your delivery (the people doing the work) to inform your decisions on how to organize your teams and backlogs.

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 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)

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...

Hello great people of the world. It’s been a while since I wrote a blog post here. This time I want to share my experience working with Development Teams and a Product Owner at iPrice group who upgraded the way they ran their Sprint Planning.

When I work with my clients on Scrum in a Marketing context the discussion about the Marketing Backlog and how to move from a big bang marketing campaign to a more iterative approach via smaller slices of stories is naturally a key area we focus on. 

A short story illustrating how fear cripples estimating and how empathy can come to the rescue.

Scrum is based on self-managed teams. Self-managed teams are able to evolve and adapt quicker in today’s highly complex working environments than traditional command-and-control management structures.

In this episode of Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer, PST Simon Bourk was live and answered the audience's questions about Scrum.

Autonomy is a critically important concept in agile culture, however ignore its counterbalance -accountability - at your peril.

Why do I think team coaching is a bad idea? Don't get me wrong, I believe team coaching can have a great amount of added value. It’s just that I often find that teams receive coaching while they should not even be a team.

Ahhh... the never-ending debate. What's the value of (Scrum) certifications? Is there any value? Why should you get certified? Is it even necessary? In this blog, Chee Hong gives his opinion about the value of certifications and the reasoning behind getting certified.

In the webinar, Kacper Mazek - Principal Consultant at Radically, Edwin Dando - Director at Radically and Professional Scrum Trainer, and Leona Cheffins - HR Business Partner at Vodafone, discuss how they used different tools, models and frameworks that helped Vodafone's business teams with Agile de...

This article on Product Backlog refinement shows that Refinement is more than just a meeting where the whole Scrum Team is having a discussion. It requires and involves everyone with shared and special responsibilities.

In this webcast, Professional Scrum Trainer Venkatesh Rajamani fields Scrum questions from the participants.

The Product Owner role is implemented in organizations in various different ways. The responsibilities and authorities of Product Owners vary across organizations, departments, teams and Product Owners. This can be explained to some extend, because it is a role that people need to grow into. The rol...

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Boris Steiner looks at several anti-patterns that he has observed over the years participating in Sprint Reviews and ways he has found to overcome them.  (4:40 Minutes)

This week, we are building our new website with a Scrum Team. Practicing what we preach, we are doing this in the most Agile, iterative way we can. So yes, we're making all the expected mistakes. In this post, we share what we learned about flow and releasing more often - with examples that are as r...

In this live webinar, Eric Naiburg, Director of Marketing and Operations for Scrum.org, describes how organizations can overcome these impediments by growing their Agile practices through empiricism, protecting Agile values, and changing the organization organically, team by team, product by product...

I have an important favor to ask to Scrum practitioners who are asking their team to commit themselves to their sprint backlog at sprint planning.