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.

I've been using a visualization that people find useful for understanding the relationship between the various Lean/Agile requirement containers. Some people call the full model a dinosaur. Others are reminded of the snake who ate an elephant from "The Little Prince". (I'm sure there is a good conne...

A Sprint Review is perhaps one of the most difficult elements in the product development with Scrum.

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

If you were in my class, you probably remember the exercise, where participants list roles, artifacts and events in Scrum.

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...

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.

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

Nobody really saw COVID-19 coming. Most people thought it would be similar to previous virus outbreaks and peter out without any meaningful impact on our daily lives. As the situation unfolded, we struggled to fully grasp the exponential nature of it. In the business world, we continually face s...

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.

Every Sprint starts with a Sprint Planning event. It is very crucial to ensure that the Scrum Team comes to a shared understanding of what and how are they going to deliver a “Done” increment that creates maximum business impact. Although, like other events Sprint Planning also is often marred with ...

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Ralph Jocham describes how Burndown Charts can be used in release planning and predictions. (4:10 Minutes)

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Ralph Jocham describes Burndown Charts and focuses on the work within a Sprint. Ralph discusses how and why they are used and provides guidance on ways to leverage them in your teams. (4:37 Minutes)

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Dominik Maximini provides a set of analogies to help understand ways of estimating work against each other and independent of each other, the reasoning behind his thinking and tips for success. (4:48)

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Dominik Maximini provides a short overview of each of the Artifacts in Scrum, describing their use, value and the roles who are responsible for managing and using them. (4:06 Minutes)

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Steven Deneir provides insights into how many Product Backlog Items should exist at a time in your Product Backlog, practices for refinement and how often to refine. (5:03 Minutes)

The emergence of the Kanban Guide for Scrum teams has given new metrics and practices to Development Teams on how they can augment their Sprint Backlog to manage their work.

This Vlog looks at the topic of Emergence from its definition as a word and application in the natural environment. Emergence in Scrum is a key principle to delivery.

Other than the Definition of Done, the Sprint Goal is the other most important aspect of Scrum.

What are the most common mistakes with Scrum that lead to dysfunctional Scrum? This time we take the perspective of the Scrum Development Team.

When we talk about Scrum for complex Product Development, it starts from Vision and Product Backlog.

This article goes into detail how anti-patterns can evolve and possibly create other issues for the Scrum Team.

Choosing how you will walk through your day, having fun with your colleagues and clients, actively listen and participating in collaborations, and ensuring others also have a great day...

Let's look at the bigger picture, leaving out the details. What we all mostly want is better health, better fitness and better movement quality.

Sprint Planning is a core event, defining how your customers’ lives will improve with the next Product Increment. Learn more on how to improve its effectiveness by avoiding 20 common Sprint Planning anti-patterns.

How to make Scrum work? Read on to learn more about my top three objectives for Scrum Masters striving to achieve Scrum Mastery.

Within the Scrum process, there are eleven basic elements that make up the framework. 3 roles, 3 artifacts, and 5 events. Practitioners need to learn to apply and understand the principles behind these in order to obtain the full benefits of the Scrum process.

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Guus Verweij discusses how acceptance criteria can be added to Product Backlog Items individually in additional to an overall Definition of Done and why it may be a good idea. (4:19 Minutes)

Outcome mapping enhances Product Backlog transparency by making transparent the relationships between goals, stakeholders, outcomes and outputs created by a Scrum Team

I will make a case why the Sprint Goal should take center stage in any Sprint. If it seems difficult, it is an opportunity to improve.

User stories are business needs, not requirements in the traditional sense. They are oriented toward the user and a business need. The big difference between a user story and other types of requirements is that a story describes a business need, not the system’s functionality.

A User Story is the most widely used Agile Practice for capturing needs and requirements and describing Product Backlog Items. To get the most of any technique it is good to understand the why behind it not just the what. Let’s discuss how to write better User Stories in Scrum.

Hello awesome people. Back at it again with new learning from the trenches. Over the years working with Product Owners who mainly work in large corporations, I see common challenges.

People always have questions and concerns about Risk management and Autonomy in the Scrum Team...

Hello awesome people. It's me again with a new learning from within a Scrum Team. The Development Team I was working with around 3 months ago challenged the Product Owner about the User Story she brought into the Sprint Planning.

Professional Scrum Trainer Chuck Suscheck is joined by Scrum.org Marketing Communications Manager Lindsay Velecina in this short Scrum Tapas video. Chuck discusses why it is important to have the Product Owner available throughout the Sprint and how that doesn't negate the need for and value of the...

Product Owners have a tough job. I was in a Sprint Review recently where the Scrum Team had some stakeholders talking about an idea they thought was excellent. So, like any studious Product Owner, they immediately typed up the idea and added it to their Product Backlog.

When working with teams new to Scrum, one of the questions I usually ask is, "What are your plans to describe non functional requirements (NFRs)?". Typically the Product Owner already has a good handle on functional requirements (i.e. new product features), yet what about the product's performance, ...

In this article we will investigate how an effective Product Backlog refinement can be conducted in Scrum.

El Sprint Backlog suele generar bastantes dudas en cuanto a su gestión. En ocasiones se convierte en un arma arromadiza que los stakeholders, el Product Owner o incluso el Scrum Master utilizan para controlar el equipo. ¿Es esta su función?

TL; DR: Ideas on How to Improve Your Product Backlog Management Techniques Scrum is a simple, yet sufficient framework to build emerging products, provided you identify in advance what is worth building. But even after a successful product discovery phase, you may struggle to make the right thing...

An organization’s ability to rapidly and deliberately respond to changing demand, while controlling risk helps ascertain its Agility.

Last week, I had a long discussion with my friends about how to scale up the Scrum Team from the startup product. That was an interesting topic and we had many things to discuss. Some of my friends raised some interesting questions.

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...

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

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.