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.
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.
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.
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?
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".
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.
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.
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.
A common challenge for businesses developing new products is having a coherent and universal understanding of what the value proposition for the organisation is.
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.
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.
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.
In this Agile Connections interview, Dr. Charles Suscheck talks with Ken Schwaber, co-creator of Scrum, one of the signatories of the Agile Manifesto, and founder of Scrum.org describes the first days of Scrum, the biggest threats to agile, and the next big idea in the Scrum framework: evidence-based management.
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.
‘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.
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.
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.
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 many “real” hours work it actually took to get something done? Read how Professional Scrum Trainer Henrik Berglund takes on this issue.
Ken Schwaber co-developed the Scrum process with Jeff Sutherland in the early 1990s to help organizations struggling with complex development projects.
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.
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 only valid release point? When do you plan your releases? Learn how the cadence of Scrum and Continuous Delivery can help you build the right thing, and when implemented properly, release it on time to ultimately deliver superior value to your customers.
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 innovation. Professional Scrum Trainer Rob van Lanen looks at how FedEx answered some of these questions and more.
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.
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.
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 now encourages the Development Team to forecast which Product Backlog Items it will deliver by the end of the Sprint.
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 Burndown chart. Professional Scrum Trainers Ralph Jocham and Henk Jan Huizer explain these changes.
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.
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.
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.