This is a great exercise to learn more about your team; to find out more about each other’s concerns and dreams and, importantly, what you can do to support them. I attended a get together / workshop style event in which we discussed how we could support each other in our day to day lives. I'd l...

In deze video geef ik commentaar op de retrospective van Koos Coach. Deze tweede episode gaat over veiligheid en respect. Opmerking: deze video is in het Nederlands. {"preview_thumbnail":"/s3/files/styles/video_embed_wysiwyg_preview/public/video_thumbnails/yhAEhieMrfs.jpg?itok=RNkw_qqE","video...

In deze video geef ik commentaar op de retrospective van Koos Coach. Deze derde episode gaat over eigenaarschap. Opmerking: deze video is in het Nederlands. {"preview_thumbnail":"/s3/files/styles/video_embed_wysiwyg_preview/public/video_thumbnails/K3V7SHmWUHA.jpg?itok=0ykcj6sf","video_url":"ht...

in deze video geef ik commentaar op de retrospective van Koos Coach. Deze eerste aflevering bevat tips voor het starten van een meeting. Opmerking: deze video is in het Nederlands {"preview_thumbnail":"/s3/files/styles/video_embed_wysiwyg_preview/public/video_thumbnails/FqIWlJcQ968.jpg?itok=h...

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainers Andre Coelho and Antonio Costa Neto discuss some examples that they have seen where the Scrum Value of Openness comes into play and why adhering to the value is important for Scrum Teams. (2:46 minutes)

A couple of weeks ago we looked at Monte Carlo analysis. We saw how this technique can be used to forecast Sprint capacity, and to anticipate the likely completion schedule for a given backlog of work.

The Agile Manifesto statement of “Customer Collaboration over Contract Negotiation” is less than helpful when it comes to writing contracts for projects to be worked in an Agile fashion.  Contracting for Agile software development projects continues to be a major organizational impediment.

I woke up Friday morning at 3 am for the second consecutive day and yet again I couldn't fall back asleep. The day before was the second and final day of my first experience co-training the new Scrum.org Professional Scrum Master II course.

You want to know IF and HOW you can "UP your Scrum" as a Scrum Master? Read this post by Professional Scrum Trainer Jasper Alblas.

In Scrum, Product Owner is responsible for maximizing the value of product being developed by Development Team. This implies that a product’s success relies heavily on the Product Owner role.

Last week I co-taught scrum.org's new Professional Scrum Master II course with fellow Professional Scrum Trainer (PST) Todd Miller. This 2-day advanced Scrum Master class is designed to be the next step that a Scrum Master takes on their journey towards Professional Scrum. We had a wonderful ...

If you’re a veteran of the software industry, you probably remember those days where we released to production/GA every couple of months. Heck, many of the companies I meet these days still work that way.

This article is directed to all who think that being a Scrum Master is inferior, and therefore think (ab)using the term “Agile Coach” is justified.

A description of experimenting with twisting the Liberating Structure 'Shift & Share' during our recent Scrum.org PSM II class.

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.

В 1970 году Роберт Гринлиф дал рождение парадоксальному термину “лидер-слуга”. Кажется, что слова “лидер” и “слуга” кажутся противоположностями друг другу. Но в этой парадоксальности заложен глубокий смысл. Вот что пишет о "лидере-слуге" Роберт Гринлиф: Как определяется успех лидера-слуги? ...

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.

As a part of the With Great People Podcast , Dave West joins host Richard Kasperowski and talks about the feeling of belonging, the regular work rhythm of great teams, and remembering that everyone is human. 

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...

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Russell Miller provides some tips for how to make the Daily Scrum more effective. Russell gives some suggestions on questions to ask to get the team more active within the Daily Scrum and ways to keep them engaged. (3:20 minutes)

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Wilbert Seele discusses why working with the Scrum Team to decide which method for capturing requirements is the right way to decide. No one method is a must and since it is all about communication, the team should be involved to pick what will ...

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Ryan Ripley looks a short exercise that he runs with his Scrum Teams and when working with other Scrum Masters to help eliminate extra meetings. Ryan evaluates how a requested meeting may fit into one of the 5 Scrum Events, getting greater invol...

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainers Ravi Vajaria and Russell Miller discuss a few ideas about how distributed Scrum Teams can be more productive.  These are just a few tips and you can find many more on the Scrum.org website. (2:15 minutes)

This article aims at helping Scrum Masters to conduct the *MOST AWESOME* Sprint Review they ever witnessed. (This article could have been titled: 41 tips that will make your Sprint Review awesome!)

This is the last in a series of 3 blogs presenting the result of an interesting research study from Sam Walker.  Walker discovered that the most successful sports teams that ever existed all shared one single element: They all had a team captain with 7 overlapping traits that made them extremely suc...

In this webinar, Course Stewards and Professional Scrum Trainers Stephanie Ockerman and Barry Overeem cover some tips on how you can improve your skills as a Scrum Master.

Just a thought on architecture in a complex environment. What is the value of a perfect architecture? Is there something as a perfect architecture? Perhaps more importantly, when is the architecture perfect?

What can a Scrum team learn from the World’s Greatest Sports Teams? In this the second of 3 blogs I'm sharing the character traits of an Elite Team Captain.

I remember being told, many years ago when I started university, that Information Technology is a numerate discipline.

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Dave West, Chief Product Owner of Scrum.org about the state of Scrum, the latest revision to the Scrum Guide, the rise of Digital and the way Scrum.org maintains its courseware.

I recently attend the Professional Scrum Master II (PSM II) course and I'd like to share my thoughts with you about it. 

What can a Scrum team learn from the World’s Greatest Sports Teams? This is the first in 3 blogs that will share a number of Leadership lessons that can be used to build high performing Scrum teams.

What is Agile HR? How HR could support this journey of transformation into an Agile company?

In 2015, Cathay Pacific had a major project on their hands which concerned the development of a new Internet Booking Engine (IBE). They needed a framework that would help them deliver within a specific time line.

The Scrum Master profession spans wide variety of skills, knowledge and experience. Scrum Masters try to create high performing teams and drive organisational change. Although our primary responsibility is the process, it’s people we work with all the time.

How we used Liberating Structures, Learning 3.0 and Training from the Back of the Room to create a new learning experience with the PSM II class.

Leveraging the power of the crowd, Professional Scrum Trainer Ryan Ripley addresses the questions of the webinar and provides guidance and advice to the most pressing questions and situations.

Anyone who has participated in a Professional Scrum Master (PSM) training knows how powerful the learning experience is. The course is challenging and helps people discover a deeper understanding of the Scrum framework to enable the benefits of business agility. With the launch of the Professional...

In this post, we’ll explain the Liberating Structure ‘15% Solutions‘ and how we've used it. It’s a wonderful structure that can ignite big change by starting with small, individual contributions.

In Scrum classes we often ask the attendees to draw a picture of the Scrum framework, in order learn what their current understanding of the framework is. In many cases people are close to remembering the three roles, three artifacts and five events.

Every time a discussion is raised on Agile Product Development and more specifically on the software side, people complain about how fast they should be to achieve market goals and, in general, lots of "un"useful upfront planning is taken in for such detail level where most people believe are ca...

In this post, we explain the Liberating Structure 'What, So What, Now What' and how we use this structure within the context of Scrum.

It has been said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results, and yet we engage in an unconscious fiction of predictability every day. We work in an uncertain world, and our main goal in pursuing agility is to confront the unknown, and in doing so, to mast...

In this webinar, moderated by Ravi Verma, panelists Uta Kapp and Dave Dame discuss 7 agile habits that Scrum Teams can gain when they embrace diversity.

It is not often that you hear about children in school using Scrum to help them with their school work. I’ve recently come across a student on social media, who has been using Scrum for school projects. I found this story very inspiring and I thought it would be fun to share with you on our blog.

Don’t say this too loudly around agile conferences, but when it comes to the day-to-day work, Scrum and Kanban teams are very similar.

Time went by so fast since my last Global Professional Scrum Trainers Face-to-Face Meeting at the Scrum.org Headquarters. My jetlag's now gone but the feelings from that awesome experience still lingers on. Allow me to share my takeaways from the last F2F: Mentorship. (This blog was co-...

In this video, watch Dave West and Professional Scrum Trainer Yuval Yeret present on Scrum, Kanban and DevOps at Agile New England. 

Agile coaching is a journey into irony. One of the chief discoveries you can make on this voyage is that the more experienced you become, the worse at the job others often think you get.

Hello, great people of the world. In my previous article, we have discussed how Scrum Masters need to master many things. In this article, we are going to discuss one of the stances that the Scrum Master need to master, that is the facilitation stance.