In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Ralph Jocham explores the difference between the definition of "Done" and acceptance criteria. Ralph compares and contrasts the two, discussing the importance "Done" and how to best leverage them. (4:14 Minutes)

Most of the concepts in Scrum are easy to understand but extremely difficult to master. This is due to the fact that Scrum is designed for perfect, and reality never is. The same principle applies to the Definition of Done.

Over the years, I've seen countless Scrum adaptions, and I thought perhaps it would be interesting to sum up some of the common misinterpretations. I would love to hear about the misinterpretations that you have faced, so feel free to participate in the comment section.

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Steve Porter looks at the impact that undone work has on technical debt and discusses some techniques to use when dealing with such issues.  Steve discusses value creation and what needs to be done to ensure value is a consideration in the proces...

Big organizations use Scrum as a driver of agility. But often after launching, management start focusing on the speed of development instead of quality. DoD is often weak and the company's agility is reduced as a result. In this article we will use system diagrams to analyze the reasons why it happe...

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Daniel Ziegler discusses the Sprint Review and how the Product Owner works with stakeholders and the Development Team on managing and reviewing requirements, Product Backlog Items and their completion. He describes how there is no official "sign...

Often I hear people say that Scrum does not take care of risk: there is no risk log, risk is not on the agenda of the Sprint Review or Retrospective as a standard agenda-item. The Developers need to be accountable for the quality of the product and how it's made. And ultimately each role in Scrum h...

The purpose of Scrum is to deliver Increments of releasable functionality. So at each Sprint Review, a “Done” Increment is required to make transparent the progress made by the team.

This short video provides a review of the Scrum Framework.  Scrum is defined by its creators in the Scrum Guide which is the body of knowledge of Scrum. 2:22 Minutes

In this session, we provide an overview of the Scrum framework, discuss how Scrum enables agility and ways that empiricism can empower the teams that use it.

There is nothing in the Scrum Guide that says that you can't have workflow across the Sprint boundary. I'm going to suggest that not only can you, but you should as long as you don't endanger the Sprint Goal. The definition of Done is an instrumental part of maintaining transparency of the past w...

Specify only the absolute “must dos” and “must not dos” for achieving a purpose. Ideal for creating a Definition of Done, a Minimal Viable Product or a Team Manifest.

Everyone building software products today aspire to be able to seamlessly update the production software in a continuous manner. To be able to deploy code without the ‘normal’ friction of process controls, reviews, test departments and committee meetings.

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer David Dame discusses why the "Definition of Done" is so important when working with Scrum Teams to improve their health. David provides examples of how morale is boosted by the their ability to deliver and know what they are focusin...

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer Thomas Schissler talks about what it means to have a "Done" Increment. He addresses the importance of "Done", how you can have multiple Increments within a Sprint and the impact that getting to "Done" has on the Scrum Team. 5:41 Mi...

When multiple Scrum Teams are working on one product, shared DoD becomes necessary. DoD helps to ensure that each increment is transparent by the end of every Sprint and creates a shared understanding of what “Done” means.

“The secret of success is to be ready when your opportunity comes” - Benjamin Disraeli A glance back at “Done” A few weeks ago we looked at the Definition of Done, which describes the conditions which must be satisfied before a team’s deliverables can be considered fit for release. Th...

If agility is why your organization adopts Scrum, look for more sophistication in employing Scrum. Through Scrum, teams and organizations create the opportunity of having a releasable version of product no later than by the end of each Sprint, where a Sprint takes no more than 4 weeks, and often ...

“Scrum begins with Done”. The assertion might seem counter-intuitive, as though we must start by defining the end.

Muchas veces sucede que la comunicación no es clara cuando se quiere definir que es terminado. Por ejemplo, cuándo un usuario especifica que requiere un reporte con cuatro columnas y que la última columna tenga un total parece algo sencillo.

As I get older, I'm turning into one of those annoying nostalgic-types who reminisces too much. Things were better back in the day, son. We had standards see, and there was less of this "dumbing-down". Yip.

"Not a tester, so what are you then?" you might ask. Being that offending is generally not helpful. Unless you try to catch the attention as I do in this blog post ;-) Let's digest the situation in detail. A friend of mine attended my Scrum Developer class and caught fire during the...

Let me quickly describe a potential situation how this came about. During the Sprint Planning, the team had agreed to deliver the top 5 Backlog items. They had some conversations about what the items are and where the problems could lie within those. The Product Owner had the feeling that just th...

One of the recurring Scrum Myth discussions I have with colleagues, teams new to Scrum and those attending training when comparing Scrum & DevOps relate to a misinterpretation of the following paragraph from the Scrum Guide. At the end of a Sprint, the new Increment must be “Done,” which mean...

One of the arguments used against Scrum and a common misconception at the same time is the idea that quality is traded for speed in Scrum. As a PST with years of experience in Quality Assurance I decided to challenge this myth. I believe and I have seen many times that proper way of implementing Scr...

The Sprint Goal helps provide focus on an objective we want to achieve and allows the flexibility to negotiate the work to achieve that objective. Creating a clear Sprint Goal can be challenging for Scrum Teams.  Here are four common problems with Sprint Goals and a few tips for improving them.

On July 7th the Scrum community gathered in Amsterdam (The Netherlands) for the 5th edition of Scrum Day Europe. This year's theme was 'the next iteration'. Therefore we looked back to see what Scrum brought us the last 20 years but also looked forward to the future of Scrum. Naturally, the evaluati...

In this paper, Professional Scrum Trainer Barry Overeem takes a look at how Business Intelligence (BI) projects can be seen as complex, where the amount of unknown requirements and technologies exceeds the known. Implementing Scrum with a BI-environment, with a focus on creating actionable insights,...

The purpose of Scrum is to create a potentially shippable Increment by the end of a Sprint. This is so important that people now use many terms to describe this Scrum artifact. Working. Releasable. Done. Done done. However, many teams struggle to produce a done Increment. Without working soft...

Over the past 10 years I have worked with many organisations and helped them to use Scrum to create innovative and sometimes market leading Products. I have seen a lot of Scrum during this time, much of it done well, but some of it done badly. Here are the 5 common anti patterns that I see with team...

I was recently contacted by a senior executive of a mid-sized company that is evolving their product development to Scrum. He explained a situation he had been in and wanted my opinion. He accepted me to share his story here (with some abstractions, and calling him Jim) in an open-ended way, invitin...

Companies have two avenues for growth: acquisition, or organic growth. Regardless of how they are growing their increasing size increases the difficulty of the company successfully responding to change. Retaining as much as possible of advantage of that small company’s ability to rapidly piv...

Scaled Professional Scrum is based on unit of development called a Nexus. The Nexus consists of up to 10 Scrum teams, the number depending on how well the code and design are structured, the domains understood, and the people organized. The Nexus consists of practices, roles, events, and artifacts t...

Scrum brings agility to and creates Agile organizations through the implementation of empirical process control, the process of frequent inspection and adaptation. The empiricism of Scrum serves discovering and taking advantage of opportunities and options, at all levels; people, technology, market....

I always spend time during training classes thoroughly covering the concept of Definition of Done, sometimes abbreviated “DoD.” As a concept it’s fairly easy to understand and people generally see the value right away. And in practice, for many teams, this concept is the single biggest game changer ...

You need quality enablement to achieve predictable delivery for your organisation which takes effort to achieve. I do a lot of ALM Assessments for companies and almost every customer that I speak to has unpredictable quality in the software delivery that they receive from their teams. This is not...

I did a coaching and training session with a company recently. They're a small, early-stage company in the Greater Boston-area. I got a call from the owner (let's call him Mike) looking for help solving their problems with Team Foundation Server version control. Mike was complained that they were re...