Resources

A self-managing team is a fundamental part of effectivity. How can this happen during Sprint Planning? Check it out!

“Carryover” is not a thing in Scrum, and I think we need to stop using that terminology. Because by giving it a special name, it gets normalized. Plus the term itself is misleading. In this post, I will talk about “carryover” really means and how to handle it.

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

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

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

A Scrum Event is a meeting. So why don't we just call it that? Why create a new word? Given the poor reputation that meetings have, maybe it's not a surprise. Rather than replicate the name and pain of meetings, the Scrum Events are designed to replace them and be all that you need. The power of the Scrum Events is in the way they're time-boxed and in their purpose. Let's take a closer look.

I have had the opportunity to work with some truly amazing teams that have achieved pretty amazing outcomes. One thing that every team has had in common is that, at one time, they were new to Scrum. When I engage with teams to discuss implementing the Scrum framework, they often raise potential impediments to adopting Scrum. Below are the five most common objections to Scrum and why they don’t hold any weight.

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Ryan Brook describes Sprint Planning, its purpose, effective ways to facilitate it, goals, outcomes, and why it is such an important event in Scrum.

According to the 15th annual State of Agile report, there has been a tremendous increase in the adoption of agile frameworks over the last year. Within software teams, agile adoption grew from 37% in 2020 to 86% in 2021.

Each Scrum Event serves Inspection, the second pillar of Empiricism. So does Sprint Planning. How? Find out ...

We’ve already discussed the importance of decentralised command and decision-making in an earlier blog, outlining how managers need to be able to train, mentor and teach their teams.

Welcome back to the professional Scrum foundations series. As introduced last week, empiricism is one of the underlying concepts of the Scrum framework.  Scrum is founded on empirical process control, and transparency is one of the three pillars.

In this video series, Scrum.org has worked with Atlassian University to design a set of videos to help Scrum practitioners improve how they use Jira while practicing Professional Scrum. This series is ongoing and will continue to evolve and grow over time.

There are plenty of failure possibilities with Scrum. Given that Scrum is a framework with a reasonable yet short “manual,” this effect should not surprise anyone.

There is a better way than staggered iterations for delivery that will keep you on the path to agility. Staggered iterations lead to more technical debt and lower quality software.

Many organisations wrestle with the seeming incompatibility between agile and release management, and they struggle with release planning and predictable delivery.

In the 2020 update of the Scrum Guide, the Sprint Planning section has had a very welcome update. Every part of Scrum has a purpose, a reason to why it's included in the framework, and this update made the purpose - raison d'etre - of the Sprint Planning clearer. Let's see how!

Scrum is defined completely in the Scrum Guide by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, the originators of Scrum.  The Scrum Guide is maintained independently of any company or vendor and therefore lives on a brand neutral site.  The Scrum Guide is translated and available in over 30 languages.

A Sprint Planning checklist? How dare you: Agile is a mindset, not a methodology. It is a journey, not a destination. There is no one-size-fits-all approach, and what else could you possibly cover with a checklist, the mother of all standardized processes?

TL; DR: 70 Scrum Master Theses The following 70 Scrum Master theses describe the role of from a holistic product creation perspective.

As per Scrum Guide – The Sprint Goal is an objective that will be met within the sprint by implementing the Product Backlog, and it guides the Development Team on why it is building the Increment.

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.

Facing a large number of risks while delivering products seems to be normal. And, it is. It is common and natural. What we need to do, is manage the risk.

We often try to make massive change once we realize something isn't right and this doesn't normally go so well. When it comes to making progress everyone wants to LEAP; take BIGGER steps.

Philips, with their roots in complexity science, used both the Scrum framework and Liberating Structures to help people navigate challenges, from small to complex, by working together effectively. This case study is the first in a series to demonstrate how Scrum Teams (can) use Liberating Structures to deliver more value to their stakeholders. Each case study focuses on how one particular Liberating Structure was used to help Scrum Teams overcome a the company challenge frequently experienced by many teams.

In May 2019, I spoke at the Agile Manchester conference, where I presented my talk "The Product Owner's Toolbox".

“Can an R&D team of chemists, physicists, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers and embedded software developers optimize teamwork and value by using Scrum? And can live virtual Scrum training deliver a practical Scrum learning experience to everyone on such a functionally diverse team?”

Without skilled developers, the Scrum Framework is no more than lipstick on a pig.

Your Sprint Planning Meetings don’t have to be a chore. Your Sprint Backlog doesn’t have to be a mess. Do short backlog refinement meetings twice a week and sleep a lot.

Habits first and then progress follows! There is a huge power in the little things.

Would like a tool that delivers better product and customer outcomes and actually pays for itself? Read on.

The fact is, Scrum and DevOps works well together.

A physical build monitor - like a light that turns red when a build fails - is a great way to get fast feedback. Its also a fun & educational activity for Development Teams, as it gives them a product of their own they can apply their craft to. And it encourages a Developer Culture.

“Our problem is that we can’t plan Sprints accurately with velocity,” he said. “Some Sprints, our velocity is really high, in others, we barely achieve anything.”

As a Scrum practitioner you may have read the famous paper The New New Product Development Game.

In our work of building Agile capability in organisations and training, mentoring and coaching hundreds of teams, we saw that Scrum Teams that embraced and lived Scrums core values, exhibited the same characteristics that Google found in its quest for the secret of high performing teams.

Scrum is a straightforward framework to develop complex software products in a complex environment but hard to practice.

This eighth article now looks into supporting a distributed Development Team organizing a remote Daily Scrum.

*Covid is a fictional character based on my imagination that represents the strain of CoronaVirus that is causing the disease Covid-19. This is just a very simple and sincere attempt to put my knowledge and understanding about Covid-19 to test in this article and I tried making the connection with Scrum. I hope you enjoy it.

The COVID19 pandemic gives us plenty of opportunities to think about uncertainty, complexity, and how to deal with those using Empiricism.

This seventh article now looks into organizing a remote Sprint Review with a distributed team: How to practice the review with virtual Liberating Structures, including and giving a voice to team members, stakeholders, and customers.

Although most people see the value of Sprint Goals, how to create them is a huge source of confusion and frustration. Is the Spring Goal there before the Sprint Backlog? How do you create a Sprint Goal out of the unrelated set of items at the top of your Product Backlog? And should everything on the Sprint Backlog be related to the Sprint Goal? In this post I work from examples of a real product, and the Sprint Goals we used there, to answer those questions.

Working overtime in stressful situations is not a viable long-term remedy and should not be seen as a professional solution, but as a warning signal to be heard courageously.

Scrum es un marco flexible que ofrece muchas ventajas para el desarrollo de productos complejos, pero puede ser fácilmente mal interpretado. Justamente esa libertad puede llevar a distorsiones en su uso.

Are scrum and personal effectiveness compatible? In recent weeks I have experienced using Scrum for my personal organization.

This sixth article now dives into organizing a remote Sprint Planning with a distributed team: practices, virtual Liberating Structures, and lessons learned.

The Scrum Master encourages the Scrum Team to improve, within the Scrum process framework, its development process and practices to make it more effective and enjoyable for the next Sprint.

In this blog post I explain why the Sprint Goal is key for an effective implementation of Scrum and how it is widely present in the Scrum framework by exploring its “lifecycle”. 

Scrum is intended as a simple, yet sufficient framework for complex product delivery.

Having a Sprint Goal in some cases is not easy. Having a good Sprint Goal is even more difficult.