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Blog Post
I work with a lot of companies to help them to improve their development processes and to either adopt Scrum or improve how they’re currently doing Scrum. Lately, I’ve noticed that a fair number of companies run into problems with a certain kind of project: The Rewrite Project.
On this kind of p...
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Blog Post
In 1995, the first codified version of Scrum was made public. In 2010, the co-creators of Scrum, Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, described the roles and rules of Scrum in the Scrum Guide. The Scrum Guide is globally recognized as the definite body of knowledge to Scrum.
The value of the Scrum G...
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Blog Post
At Scrum.org, we sometimes dare to talk about our what we do as “bringing humanity to work.” Sometimes I get reminded this idea is more than hyperbole or aggrandizing.
This week I was a guest speaker at a small symposium on DevOps in my hometown of Seattle. I spoke about Scrum.org’s take on...
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Blog Post
Recently I was involved in a discussion with Scrum.org trainers regarding the question “What is a failed Sprint?" I think we came to the same opinion and the same answer.
And, in your opinion, what a failed Sprint is:
If the team doesn’t complete all the forecasted Product Backlog ...
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Webcast
Dan Sloan introduces the pillar of transparency in Scrum and will navigate you through a journey of successes and challenges he’s encountered in his years of coaching and training Scrum teams around the globe.
4.4 from 311 ratings
Blog Post
I am a Scrum Trainer with Scrum.org. I work with lots of organizations to help them become more agile. I see a lot of bad Scrum. More than my fair share. Sometimes I see so much bad Scrum that it makes me question why I do this. This post is my attempt to remind myself why.
What is bad Scrum...
4.8 from 2 ratings
Blog Post
Today we are pleased to announce the release of ScrumGuides.org, a branding-free website providing the single authoritative definition of Scrum.
For the last several years, Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, the original creators of Scrum, have worked together to maintain the rules of Scrum in t...
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Blog Post
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...
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Blog Post
In a recent Scrum training class, I had a group of skilled and experienced software Product Managers (from a few different companies) who had, earlier in their careers, worked as sales professionals in the field – so they had a deep understanding of the traditional sales professional “minds...
5 from 1 rating
Blog Post
I was talking to a friend the other day. She was looking for a job as a Scrum Master. Her background is technical and the last year or so she has been working as a professional coach. Not in IT that is. Just helping people to think and grow.
We came to talk about if she should include her c...
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Blog Post
Many companies have started searching for self-organisation. That ideal or nirvana where teams can figure out how to work together effectively with limited or little direction to solve problems.
Many, including some of my colleagues, believe that this search for self-organisation is ultimate...
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Blog Post
I work in the public sector as an Agile coach. One of the question I often get asked is how to estimate the size of a new project, or a new delivery, as we need to determine a budget before executing it.
One practice that has proven useful for this in my work experience is what I call the wall se...
4.8 from 2 ratings
Blog Post
Scrum.org holds a consistently high quality bar for our instructors. The result is a tremendously mature and capable cadre of experts working together to realize our shared mission of improving the profession of software development. The full list of of our PSTs (Professional Scrum Trainers) is here...
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Blog Post
Does your company culture resemble Survivor? Do you have a culture in your organisation where individuals that help others are considered slackers for not getting their own assignments complete?
If you are trying to achieve agility it is imperative that your team members work together to solve ...
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Blog Post
One of the important event in Agile this year seems to be an argument around Test Driven Development (TDD). More precisely, high profile personalities in our industry debated against the statement "TDD is dead". Initially launched by David Heinemeier Hansson at the RailsConf keynote, it created quit...
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Blog Post
Did you know that the DOD has made it illegal to do waterfall? For the first time in many years the Department of Defence (DOD) in the United States had made a major update to its procurement rules. They can no longer be held accountable for holding up our industry, and being culpable for its inabil...
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Blog Post
The simple cycle of trying, inspecting, and adapting must be as old as mankind. Can’t you just picture Homo Erectus learning to control fire? I bet scorched fingers and cold nights were fairly common for a millennia or so while we refined the art of spark and tinder.
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Blog Post
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Volunteers at the Port Of San Diego - Operation Clean Sweep 2013
Think about this: If everyone in your organization could do whatever they wanted at work, would they do anything differently compared to today?
If so, your organization is in big trouble!
Why?
Because that means that...
5 from 1 rating
Blog Post
As a Agile coach, I refer to a few tools to help me think about where my Scrum teams should go next on their path to Agility. One of these tools is the Agile subway map, a list of Agile practices grouped in different categories. It helps me think how a specific practice could help a team solve its a...
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Blog Post
Recently I gave a talk on the ScrumDayEurope 2014 conference. The talk was about how you can use game principles in combination with evidence based management (EBM) in your agile adoption. One of the hard points in evidence based management is that people tend to ignore evidence when that evidence c...
3.5 from 91 ratings
Blog Post
A month has passed since the FIFA World Cup finals! With that, a number of less successful football coaches are probably looking for new jobs...
But as the disappointed countries ditch their old coaches, they will most probably hire a new one right away.
It seems that for elite...
5 from 1 rating
Blog Post
A few weeks ago I headed out to the Scrum.org offices in Boston to participate in training to hone my skills as an Evidence-based Management Consultant. I was talking to my father about it when I got back and was surprised that he recognised many of the practices and tools.
In the 1990's my fat...
4.5 from 1 rating
Blog Post
A common challenge for businesses developing new products is having a coherent and universal understanding of what the value proposition for the organisation is.
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Blog Post
Story Points - An Introduction
The scrum guide tells us that estimates should be provided by people that will be doing the work but it doesn’t tell us how we should provide estimates. It leaves that decision to us. A common tactic used by scrum teams is to estimate using a unit of measurement r...
4.5 from 5 ratings
Webcast
Mark Noneman discusses how the phrase “technical debt” has become a commonly used phrase in software development.
4.5 from 4 ratings
Blog Post
Collaboration is the key to successful agile product development. A community of practice is a technique that helps us achieve this.
Inspired by the Agile Conference in Orlando in July I visited the Kennedy Space Center close to Cape Canaveral to marvel at good old Space Shuttle Atlantis. Watchin...
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Blog Post
The Scrum.org blog is branching out to include our entire expert community! Now, readers will get more than the occasional formal article. The collective wisdom of all 150-ish Scrum.org Experts will be streaming to you on a regular basis.
Help Seed the Content
The Scrum.org community has some ...
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Blog Post
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...
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Blog Post
We shall talk about the most important, from my point of view, team’s trait - Helping Each Other. After discussion I will give you a powerful game that can help you to foster and promote real “one for all, all for one” team spirit.
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Blog Post
The Scrum.org crew just returned from the Agile 2014 conference in Orlando. The great conversations with attendees were as good as the sessions themselves. There are people doing some truly amazing things with Scrum and software and this conference is a great place to meet up with them.
I haven’t...
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Blog Post
It's difficult to predict the future despite the techniques we use to try to do just that. The reality is that planning out even a simple software development project is a challenge. There are many different variables to take into account, and therefore, an equal number of reasons for things to go w...
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Blog Post
When organizations consider or start adopting Scrum, a frequently raised concern is how ‘to scale Scrum’. It is worthwhile investigating this desire, and start exploring the scalability of Scrum.
It seems that many organizations have grown into very complicated and extremely interdependent intern...
5 from 1 rating
Blog Post
‘Evidence-Based Management’ for software organizations promotes evidence-based decision-making in the managerial domain to create a more sustainable business through improved services in turbulent markets and businesses.
Scrum.org, which has Scrum as its DNA and empiricism as guiding principle, p...
4 from 3 ratings
Blog Post
I have encountered many in the Agile community who love Scrum but seem to hate on the practice of Scrum of Scrums. Others describe their Scrum of Scrums as an overarching meeting of Scrum Masters, or as a meeting for a Product Owner team.
In my experience, however, a Scrum of Scrums is a great wa...
4.4 from 9 ratings
Blog Post
The aim to deliver valuable software is a great, core principle of the agile movement. The difficulty however is that ‘value’ in itself is hardly quantifiable. Yet, I do believe it is imperative to think in terms of value in software development and therefore overcome some fluffiness attached to ‘va...
2.9 from 16 ratings
Whitepaper
There is this small germ that keeps thriving year after year. Untreated it will bring the organizations it infects to an unheroic death. To check your organizational health, answer these two questions: Do you estimate work in “ideal” hours and do you follow up on your estimates, comparing it to how ...
2.8 from 4 ratings
Blog Post
Every year, organizations spend 4-10% of their revenues on their IT organizations. Value is expected in return for these expenditures.
Here, value is defined as the financial benefit that an organization receives for expenditures. When measured, value can encompass an entire organization, or be c...
4.2 from 5 ratings
Case Study
For reasons of competitiveness the delivery of IT services of Amir Arooni's department (CIO of the Solution Delivery Center for Channels at ING NL) needed fundamental improvements. Amir Arooni, Gunther Verheyen take a look at how this was achieved.
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Whitepaper
Professional Scrum Trainer Peter Gfader is often asked several question including: How often do you release your product to your end users? How often do your end users see and use your product? Do you release in sync with your Sprint length, after the Sprint Review? Is the Sprint Review meeting the ...
5 from 2 ratings
Whitepaper
How can my team deliver value and innovation in 24 hours without intervention from management? A "FedEx Day" can be used to show management that just a few people can deliver innovative, working products and software in only 24 hours, and how intrinsic motivators are the key to unlocking our own inn...
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Whitepaper
Learn more from Professional Scrum Trainer Gunther Verheyen about the distinct views and similiarities between Lean and Agile. Included is the Scrum perspective to Agile to demonstrate how the tangible, yet open framework of Scrum aligns and blends the underlying thinking of Agile and Lean.
5 from 1 rating
Whitepaper
Increasing develpoment productivity is a hot topic. This paper by Professional Scrum Trainer Rob Maher focuses on increasing team productivity and discusses how changing a project staffing model can increase the productivity of project teams.
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Publication
One of the most controversial updates to the 2011 Scrum Guide has been the removal of the term “commit” in favor of “forecast” in regards to the work selected for a Sprint. We used to say that the Development Team commits to which Product Backlog Items it will deliver by the end of the Sprint. Scrum...
4.6 from 41 ratings
Publication
Any Product Manager that has successfully delivered a product to a customer knows how incredibly important Release Planning is. Despite its importance, the 2011 Scrum Guide, published in July by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, removes any discussion about Release Planning and the related Release B...
4.2 from 13 ratings
Blog
The chicken and pig lore of Scrum is no longer a part of the Scrum Guide. Professional Scrum Trainer Steve Porter discusses the signifigance of what some may assume to be a relatively innocuous change.
3.2 from 6 ratings
Publication
In the past, the Scrum Guide consistently used the word "priority" for the Product Backlog or noted that the Product Backlog was “prioritized.” While the Product Backlog must be ordered, ordering by priority is only one many techniques — and rarely the best one at that.
4.6 from 27 ratings
Publication
The 2011 Scrum Guide, published earlier this month by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, makes some bold changes regarding the definition and structure of a Sprint Backlog. Professional Scrum Trainer David Starr explains these changes with help from Professional Scrum Trainer Ryan Cromwell.
5 from 1 rating