A description of the Liberating Structure "User Experience Fishbowl and how we've used it within Scrum.

People who attend the PSM course or the Professional Scrum Foundations (PSF) course are given two attempts at passing the Professional Scrum Master I assessment.

In this blog article, we provide a quick overview of the most viewed blog articles over the past 18 months, giving readers insight into what they mind valuable to read.

Agile Metrics are meant to serve certain purpose(s) and can be very useful if leveraged appropriately. In this series, I want to share my experiences of how metrics may be used, abused and effectively become focal point of failure of Agile adoption in an organization.

I recently finished writing a book with fellow Professional Scrum Trainer, Don McGreal, titled,  "The Professional Product Owner: Leveraging Scrum as a Competitive Advantage." I learned a lot from this experience and wanted to share it here. 

In this session, Valerie Pearce, Senior Software Architect and Nic Easton, Nexus Scrum Master and Software Engineer III from Net Health, and Patricia Kong, Scrum.org Product Owner of Enterprise Solutions, walk through how Net Health scaled Scrum by implementing the Nexus framework in their product d...

Vor kurzem haben die beiden Autoren des Artikels sich einmal mehr mit der Frage beschäftigt, wie sich erfolgreiche und weniger erfolgreiche Teams unterscheiden und was die Erfolgsfaktoren für erfolgreiche Teams sind.

One of the key Kanban practices is Limiting Work in Progress. If you want to be pedantic, actually what this practice aims for is Reducing and stabilizing Work in Progress. This improves flow, provides predictability, and is actually even more important for creating a pull-based Kanban system than v...

Leveraging Scrum as a Competitive Advantage: Product ownership is about more than mechanics: it’s about taking accountability and focusing on value in everything you do. In The Professional Product Owner, two leading experts in Scrum product ownership show how to identify, measure, and maximize valu...

As a servant-leader, the Scrum Master sometimes has to make very difficult decisions. This might even include removing someone from the Scrum Team. Obviously, this a difficult decision that should not be taken light-hearted. In this post, we'll share some perspectives on the kinds of situations wher...

I often use innovative games as a useful addition for Sprint Reviews. They help clients better understand and thus improve the product. One of my favourite games is the Speed Boat. The Speed Boat game explores user’s pains and jobs.

In this talk, Dave West Product Owner and CEO of Scrum.org and Mik Kersten CEO of Tasktop discuss the challenges of introducing value streams to a Scrum world and how you can balance flexibility with the structure to enable better flow and deliver more value to customers. They discuss how to avoid V...

Vor kurzem habe ich mit einem Team die interessante Frage aufgeworfen, ob Softwareentwickler Leidenschaft für das Produkt das sie entwickeln benötigen oder ob Leidenschaft für Technologie wichtiger ist.

In this blog, PSTs Sjoerd Kranendonk and Wilbert Seele explain how to achieve more and risk less by being a less visible Product Owner. In the Scrum Guide the following is written about the role of the PO: "The Product Owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the product and the work of the ...

If you give a developer a verbal warning for surfing social media all day, you are crushing their autonomy. Insisting on core hours of 10am-4pm violates self-organisation. Personal development plans are so PRINCE II. Right? Well, maybe. On the other hand, having someone relatively experienced and...

We have gathered content on this page which we suggest you utilize when preparing for the PSM II. These are suggested resources, and you may find additional resources not mentioned on this page helpful, along with the application of your own experience using Scrum.

In this blog post we've shared our ideas on "Your Scrum Master Journey" and the first steps we've made at a Dutch customer.This week Christiaan Verwijs and I facilitated a workshop at a Dutch customer in which Scrum Masters could provide a pitch for participating in "Your Scrum Master Journey".

Suggested reading for anyone who is taking the Professional Agile Leadership™ certification assessment or just looking to learn more about being an Agile Leader.

Special Spanish Edition presented by Professional Scrum Trainer, Joel Francia and Rodolfo Suarez, Agile Consultant, CeaSoft  En este webinar exploramos el Rol del Product Owner en Scrum. - Parte de las responsabilidades del Product Onwer es definir una visión y objetivos de negocio para el pro...

In the "Scrum from the trenches" blog post series I like to address topics that I encounter in practicing Scrum in the real world, with real Scrum Teams. Sharing where theory comes into practice, what challenges teams encounter along the way and ways to help Scrum practitioners use the power of empi...

As a Product Owner, there is nothing more frustrating than having to use valuable development time to deal with technical debt. Like death and taxes, it’s just never a good time when those lurking defects decide to unravel.

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Don McGreal reviews how he runs a Sprint Planning session with his Scrum Teams. Don focuses on how the Development Team works with the Product Owner to understand what is in the Product Backlog and how they populate the Sprint Backlog. 5:20 Minu...

One of the most common questions I am asked in my Professional Scrum Master (PSM) courses and in coaching engagements is: How do we build trust? This is a complex topic. And there are no simple or quick processes or techniques that will guarantee an outcome. Nor can you know how long it w...

Originally Broadcast on the Passionate Team Podcast in this episode they talk with Dave West, CEO and Product Owner of Scrum.org about how Scrum enables passion among Scrum Team members.

“Most executives, many scientists, and almost all business school graduates believe that if you analyze data, this will give you new ideas. Unfortunately, this belief is totally wrong. The mind can only see what it is prepared to see.” - Edward de Bono If you are ever hired as an agile coach,...

When your product gets really big and you need to work with teams at scale, what options do Product Owners have? In this episode, Scrum.org CEO, Dave West joins the show to discuss the Nexus framework and what PO’s need to know in order to work in this type of scaled environment. We cover some of th...

What can you do as a Leader to help your Scrum Teams to become mature? Discover a 5-level maturity pattern that you can use as a reference.

I would like to discuss Scrum and XP because I often get a question "When should I use Scrum or XP?" from people in the community.

We regularly work with teams that see the Daily scrum as irrelevant, disruptive, and boring. They are often right. Here are three common anti-patterns and three potential solutions.

You’ve implemented Agile into your organization and hired professionals with Agile experience on their résumé to back it up. Yet, something is still not right. The gains that Agile promised don’t seem to be coming to fruition. Delivery times aren’t faster than they were before.

Simon Sinek in his book „Start With Why“ talks about the importance of knowing why we are doing things before we think about what and how to do it. I think it is a good idea for Scrum Teams also to start with why for their product development. An important point for Simon is „people don’t buy wha...

In this webinar, we provide an overview of Nexus, describe how it is being used around the world to help organizations scale their Agile efforts with Scrum. Our presenters then demonstrate how these real-world scenarios using Nexus can be applied within the VersionOne Lifecycle solution. 

Try organizing a party in a “Yes, but…” atmosphere. The result is probably a zillion obstacles identified, but no party.

In everything we do there should be some value - some importance in what we do. If not, then why do it? Without any worth, the thing that you're doing becomes a chore or you can easily drift on to something else. So we need to see the value in what we're doing. However, as a team we don't alwa...

"The most important metrics are: did we execute the way in which we said we would, and did we deliver the value to the business that we had promised?" - Jamie S. Miller In an earlier post we took a critical look at metrics and at how easily they can be abused. Pretty much anything can be meas...

I have recently been helping a new Scrum team get started with the framework and helping them to set themselves up with the best chance of being successful with Scrum. After a two week sprint in which they did deliver an increment and learned a lot about the product that they would be work on, it...

In this webinar, Patricia Kong, Scrum.org Product Owner of Enterprise Solutions and co-creator of Nexus provides an overview to the Nexus Framework, its principles and the thinking behind it. She will discuss how Nexus, like Scrum, promotes bottom-up intelligence to discover and emerge what works be...

In this post, we address the myth that the Sprint Review is primarily an opportunity to ‘demo’ the increment to stakeholders. Although a demo certainly can be part of a Sprint Review, it fails to capture what the Sprint Review is actually about...

Steve Porter joined Agile for Humans host Ryan Ripley to discuss a wide variety of deep Scrum topics and approaches.

“Agile” has become a buzzword in the software development industry as well as the wider business landscape. And for good reason – several organizations have cited Agile principles as the influence behind results such as better financial performance, project success, customer satisfaction and employe...

There is nothing in the Scrum Guide that says that you can't have workflow across the Sprint boundary. I'm going to suggest that not only can you, but you should as long as you don't endanger the Sprint Goal. The definition of Done is an instrumental part of maintaining transparency of the past w...

Wenn man Scrum auf einen einzigen Begriff reduzieren müsste, welcher wäre das?

Back in the early days of Scrum, the Scrum Master role was exciting. The days of the pigs & chickens, the days when being a Scrum Master was considered dangerous. In those times there was the saying a dead Scrum Master is a useless Scrum Master  And even today I still use that when selecting a...

This document provides an overview of the changes made to the Nexus Guide over time.

According to Forrester Research, 90% of Agile teams use Scrum.[1] One reason for this popularity is that Scrum is a simple framework that promotes transparency and empiricism. It is based on a set of principles and values, and consists of three roles (Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Development Tea...

In August 2015, Ken Schwaber and Scrum.org introduced the Nexus framework to the public via the Nexus Guide, the definitive guide to scaling Scrum. Today, on January 17, 2018, we release the first update to the Nexus Guide.

“I designed a defined framework for using many Scrum Teams on a single product or problem. The result is Nexus, an exoskeleton that rests on top of many Scrum Teams. Nexus provides information and management information for guiding their working together.” - Ken Schwaber

An online version of The Definitive Guide to Nexus

During some Scrum training classes, I have been asked, can teams practice Continuous Delivery (CD) , using the Scrum Framework? The answer is a resounding yes!   Let's explore why some believe that Scrum only allows you to release at the most, every Sprint against what the Scrum Guide says.   

In this article we’ll bust the myth that in Scrum too much time is spend in meetings. We’ll not only describe how time-consuming the Scrum events factually are, but also clarify the purpose and importance. After explaining the origins of this myth, we’ll offer some practical tips to prevent or resol...