Resources

A Sprint Goal is an objective set for the Sprint that can be met through the implementation of Product Backlog (cit. Scrum Guide). Have you clearly defined a Sprint Goal at the end of your Sprint Planning? Is this Sprint Goal understandable and transparent to everyone? Is it defined in a way that provides guidance and flexibility to the Development Team? The aim of this article is to raise awareness on the importance of having a Sprint Goal defined and to provide some suggestions on how to create one.

A paradox is something that is seemlingly absurd but really true. When I experience complexity and uncertainty, I find comfort and power in paradox. It opens up creativity, possibility, and collaboration. Let's take a look at 4 paradoxes we need to navigate in the agile world and beyond.

Scrum Masters are often understood mostly as “team coaches”. Yet, their role is vastly more important. The Scrum Guide emphasizes that Scrum Masters are responsible for leading and coaching organizations in the adoption of Scrum and causing change that increases the productivity of the Scrum Team.

A couple of years ago I blogged on Innovation Accounting in Scrum, and the bringing of empiricism to Product Ownership. On Tuesday I gave a presentation on this topic to the Agile Northants UK meetup. There was a pretty good Q&A afterwards.

I collected lots of feedback from different students around Europe that attended my Professional Scrum Developer Training. Here some photos to give you an idea...

Na edição de Abril teremos os PSTs Alexandre Macfadden, Andre Coelho e André Gomes respondendo ao vivo suas perguntas mais difíceis e complexas sobre o uso do Scrum, então, venham preparados.

Many organizations struggle in their implementation of Agile and/or their evolution of agile once they start their journey. They use practices, people, and technology to find a way to overcome their disability of delivering value to market too slowly.

Today’s reveal is a very important for us as we have facilitated Open Space events for more than 10 years with clients and in our annual conferences for example in Munich or Amsterdam and New York City.

In your organization, some problems seem to recur, they are difficult to fix using the tools, tricks and practices you developed over the years as a manager. Maybe this problem is different and the perspective of an expert-outsider might help?

In this article I will stress again the utmost importance of understanding the context of the organization as a strategy to achieve a possible, evolutionary and deep application of Scrum within organizations.

In this short Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Jasper Alblas talks about what a Scrum Master does and doesn't do. (1:37 Minutes)

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Ravi Verma describes a Sprint Retrospective in Scrum, giving tips for ways to make them valuable and how he has improved them over time. (6:02 Minutes)

I always assume that the people I work with are professionals - and not children. This is why I don’t like maturity models in whatever shape or form. And we’ve got a lot of those in our industry.

Ever wonder what a Scrum Master does all day? If you’re new to the role of a Scrum Master, you might think you have to facilitate all the events, take notes and schedule outlook meetings. Turns out you don’t have to do any of that!

Quite a few teams in organizations implementing Scrum depict their frustration in statements like “Scrum is driving us crazy!”, “It’s too chaotic!”

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.

Leadership means having the responsibility to enable an environment that harnesses the full intellectual talent of an organization. We hire a bunch of top diverse talent but limit them by unintentionally having them work only within their part or silo of a large organization.

As enterprises strive to digitize their organizations, whether it’s digitally transforming aspects of sales and marketing, customer interactions or supply chain, they’re undergoing a wholesale revamp of traditional businesses into digital business models.

In this podcast, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods at InfoQ, spoke to Dave West, CEO and Product Owner at Scrum.org about the current state of Scrum and the latest initiatives by Scrum.org.

In this presentation from Agile India 2019, Professional Scrum Trainer Mia Horrigan discusses Evidence-Based Management and how this empirical process can help agile transformations measure and manage the value derived from their transformation initiative. (38:33 Minutes)

This is a video recording of Professional Scrum Trainer Mia Horrigan's presentation at Agile India titled,"Accelerate Improvements Through Retrospectives," where she discusses some Retrospective patterns that she has found useful. (41:13 Minutes)

One of the biggest misconceptions of agile is that it focuses on speed. How fast can we deliver? How fast can we deliver on this project/product?

In this webinar, UX experts and co-authors of Lean UX, Jeff Gothelf and Joshua Seiden, along with PSU Course Steward Gary Pedretti, discuss the focuses of PSU and share tips and techniques on how Scrum Teams can integrate UX practices into their work.

The comparison between Kanban and Scrum obviously comes up often when we're talking to teams, especially in the context of Professional Scrum with Kanban. While they are more similar than many practitioners realize, one key difference is the perspective on Teams. 

Agile frameworks facilitate an iterative and incremental approach to achieving progress for defined goals, for example, streamlining the review process for digital content. Agile methods utilize time-boxed periods called Sprints to complete a set amount of work. Each planned Sprint is assigned a unique list of deliverables.

In the first episode of the Game of Frameworks series on the Agile Uprising podcast, join Patricia Kong and Kurt Bittner from Scrum.Org as they discuss the Nexus scaling framework.

Teams are becoming the fundamental organizational entity, individual responsibility is being replaced by that of the team. But responsibility does not come about all by itself.

I was working with various groups over the last year and noticed some commonalities in the problems they faced. In this blog I want to share some common collaboration problems and solutions I experimented with.

From my experience, nothing is more important for Teamwork than trust. If having the secondary importance, it’s TRUST as well. You can't build a good team while they lack of trust.

For many years, enterprises have been in a race to digitally transform how they work through the digitization of all areas of their business, to reduce costs and business frictions through creating efficiencies and delivering increased value to their customers. While many organizations have attempted a transformation, few have been successful.

This is the start of a series of articles about the Scrum.org PSM II class. It will address the most common questions asked. This article is focused on the difference between the PSM and PSM II class.

Flow of work and, most importantly, value is paramount. There are times when you keep looking at the process and don’t understand what is going on, what is wrong, and why stuff is not getting to done. Read to learn how flow can help while limiting work in progress.

The House of Scrum metaphor and sketch seemed to have piqued some interest last year. In this video I go over the 3-5-3 framework, giving a high level overview of Scrum..

Organizations are always on the lookout to cut costs and scale back when they have unfavorable reporting periods. Hiring freezes, and cutbacks in training and traveling tend to be popular and convenient.

People may have talked about these things earlier and I would like to share my experience around it. This story is long dated back when I was working on a software product for a manufacturing domain client.

I read somewhere that multi-tasking makes you stupid. So, I did some research to understand why. What I learned was both interesting and revealing.

This is the first part of a 2-part blog post series about dealing with very large Product Backlog items. Part 1 intends to focus on the Scrum Team, Part 2 will be released shortly after our Webinar on April 29th and will focus on the “Epic” challenges agile leaders are facing.

Uno de los servicios del Scrum Master es eliminar los impedimentos que tiene el equipo de desarrollo. Pero no todos los problemas son impedimentos. Hay que entender que el Scrum Master no es un solucionador de problemas.

A college roommate of mine retired this week, after a long and successful career. While he's figuring out the next chapter of his life, it caused me to think about whether the notion of a "career" is even relevant in today's world.

Many large legacy organizations are moving toward agile delivery methods in hopes of releasing faster to market. Based on my experiences, they look at it solely from a production view of getting software released faster and more often. This view has them believing this will result in getting more features released.

Through my professional experience, while serving my customers, working with Scrum Teams and training people in Professional Scrum, I have observed that some Scrum Masters only work to serve the Development Team and the Product Owner.

Ask any Agile practitioner these days what Agile values are and he/she, most likely, will recite you some lines from the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.

As many Professional Scrum Trainers have experienced, there is always a good discussion around the Sprint Goal. A similar discussion recently led me to address this not so well understood aspect.

Effective agile transformations require the right team makeup, a laser focus on business outcomes, and approaches to management and training that break from the past.

One of the most important things we can do to help individuals and teams improve is coach them to embrace the agile mindset. The Manifesto for Agile Software Development provides values and principles to help guide teams in navigating the complexities of product delivery.

Professional Scrum Trainer Alexander Brown provides a simply introduction to Test Driven Development (TDD) using a real coding demonstration. (14:39 Minutes)

Our trainings around Scrum aim at gaining knowledge in applying Scrum to improve on product development. To achieve this in an ideal way, we deliver our training in the language spoken locally.

Building (and hiring) a great team takes time and effort. Patrick Lencioni’s “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” became a staple reading in an Agile community these days.

Some teams of knowledge workers (En.wikipedia.org, 2019) work primarily on complex problems. Scrum operates in the complex problem domain, so it can be a natural choice.

A common phrase that I use in my classes is that Scrum is like the poker game Texas Hold’em; it only takes a few minutes to learn but a lifetime to master.  The “few minutes” may be a bit of a stretch but my students get the point.