Resources

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. 

What is Scrum Team Velocity? This is a tricky one, and you need to be answering it in the context of the organization you are interviewing with and its complementary practices.

I have been fortunate enough to have a successful career as a change agent. I leverage my experience of navigating the world with Cerebral Palsy — a world that was not yet ready to deal with a person with a disability — to help companies deal with their disability: their inability to change from the status quo.

Professional Scrum Trainer (PST) Gary Pedretti (@garypedretti) and User Experience expert Jeff Gothelf (@jboogie) joined Ryan Ripley on the Agile for Humans Podcast (@ryanripley) to discuss how UX/UI designers can effectively work with Scrum Teams.

In this CMS Wire Article Eric Naiburg talks about the role of the Scrum Master and where the project manager position comes into play in Scrum.

Have you heard the term “lamp post metric”? [i] This is a measurement that is easy to gather and may even seem like common sense. If you lose something on a dark night, where are you going to look?

In the previous 3 articles I reviewed some of the most important Agile metrics that Dan Vacanti’s ActionableAgile software helps you to get with ease.

Standing amidst the technological revolution, we find ourselves asking if the Agile Manifesto should still be our guide as we move into a world defined by continuous innovation....

In this paper, Kurt Bittner and Cesario Ramos discuss common systemic challenges for scaling agility. They close with a comparison between the approach to these challenges by popular scaling frameworks.

In the first part of Getting to 85 – Agile Metrics with ActionableAgile we looked at the Cycle Time Scatterplot created by ActionableAgile software.

This question "What is the duration of a Sprint" is seemingly simple, but depending on the interviewing situation, company, interviewer, and their familiarity with Scrum you might need to give them more or less details and answer additional questions your answer might bring up.

In this webinar, Dave West, CEO & Product Owner, Scrum.org and Stefan Wolpers, Founder, Age of Product, explore the results including salary trends and agile adoption patterns, while also exploring gender equality within the Scrum Master role. They provide insights on what the results of this survey may predict for the Scrum Master role moving forward.

In today’s complex ever-changing work, we need to make full use of the collective intelligence of the whole team, even if the whole organization to be able to solve and deliver on these needs.

In the first part of Getting to 85 – Agile Metrics with ActionableAgile we looked at the Cycle Time Scatterplot as generated by ActionableAgile software. That piece also discussed some ideas the scatter plot could bring about and conversations that potentially might occur.