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)

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)

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.

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.

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?

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.

As a Professional Scrum Trainer for Scrum.org I get to think about the Definition of "Done" and its meaning a lot.

A few days ago, I was observing a Sprint Retrospective. The Scrum Team decided to work on the Definition of Done (DoD), identified as the most important topic to adapt for the next Sprint. The discussions were open and animated, when an unexpected discussion emerged during the session.

The 2019 Scrum Master Trends Report by Scrum.org and the State of Agile 2018 shows numbers that provide insight in the maturity of agile adoptions.

The purpose of Scrum is to create a potentially releasable Done Product Increment, in order to realize business value. Many teams struggle in improving their Definition of Done. The technique described here allows for greater transparency on what the Definition of Done is, and what the next steps ar...

Compare the use of Scrum's Definition of Done to the professional procedures in other fields such as surgery and aviation.

This blog post is about what I learned working with my team as a Scrum Master and improved between one year using Professional Scrum with Kanban.

In this blog post, we describe how to use Conversation Cafe, as a Liberating Structure, within Scrum.

Hello, great people of the world. Welcome back to the Scrum Master blog series with yours truly. As we enter the new year, we are seeing Scrum becoming the most commonly used framework to manage complex product delivery in the industry.

In my career, I have had the great privilege to witness different companies undergo many different phases of agile transformations. I’ve met many amazing Scrum Masters along the way that have evolved to take on major responsibilities in their organizations.

Why would Product Owners prevent value delivery, you ask? They shouldn’t, and don’t want to, but yet I see them do it every day. And usually, it’s without them even knowing they’re doing it. Here’s four observations of how Product Owners prevent value delivery, and suggestions to improve.

When practicing the guitar, there have been times when I got very demotivated and frustrated until I found out I was focusing on my mistakes instead of enjoying all the good licks I was producing on my guitar as well. I learned that focusing on the good things I play makes practicing the guitar much...

A few days back I did a Scrum Tapas Video explaining a few of the rules within Scrum. Besides these rules, there are also certain guidelines which help Scrum Teams to make the best possible use of Scrum framework to create maximum Business Impact.

A short story illustrating how fear cripples estimating and how empathy can come to the rescue.

Photography may sound simple but is actually a problem of complex domain. There are many variables - light, subject, motion, distance, composition, framing - that come into play while capturing an image. Although, with current range of cameras equipped with highly adaptable sensors (empiricism) man...

Recently, I connected with Evan Cook, the founder of Head Down Heart Up (HDHU), a fitness and nutrition organization that has “The Perfect Fitness Framework,” which is a program based on Scrum, designed to simplify food and fitness.

Why do I think team coaching is a bad idea? Don't get me wrong, I believe team coaching can have a great amount of added value. It’s just that I often find that teams receive coaching while they should not even be a team.

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Andreas Ebbert-Karroum talks about Scrum Retrospective events and a tool that he has used to help improve their success rate and communication across the team.

The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe™) is one of the most popular approaches to applying agile at scale out there. SAFe's perspective is that "Nothing beats an Agile Team" and it doesn't try to reinvent the wheel or even innovate too much when it comes to the Team level

As a trainer, I often get asked for real world examples of Scrum implementations. You can't get any more real world than how Francis and Sally live their lives through Scrum, as they look for a way to help with ADHD.

This article discusses the growth of agility for customer-facing products with 3+ teams, probably tens of teams with Nexus and/or LeSS.

This week, we are building our new website with a Scrum Team. Practicing what we preach, we are doing this in the most Agile, iterative way we can. So yes, we're making all the expected mistakes. In this post, we share what we learned about flow and releasing more often - with examples that are as r...

In every Scrum.org Professional Scrum Development class, we touch upon both technical and collaboration practices to help improve the development teams explore new options.

I live many lives – in one of them, I am happily residing in the world of software development where I am also a Professional Scrum Trainer. In another, lesser known one – I am Band Manager (and former band member/musician myself) to a highly-regarded and awarded independent/underground musical act....

In deze video geef ik commentaar op de retrospective van Koos Coach. Deze tweede episode gaat over veiligheid en respect.

In deze video geef ik commentaar op de retrospective van Koos Coach. Deze eerste aflevering bevat tips voor het starten van een meeting.

In deze video geef ik commentaar op de retrospective van Koos Coach. Deze derde episode gaat over eigenaarschap.

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 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 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...

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.

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 ...

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

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.

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.

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Chris Lukassen is joined by Intergamma's Scrum Master Jochen Hendriks to discuss how misinterpreted requirements can provide the completely wrong solution for the users, yet sound as if it was exactly what they wanted.  They will use a real-world...

Throughout my career I have helped many leaders adapt their style to one that better supports teams reach a high-performing state. Across a wide range of different industries the patterns of high-performing teams, and how leaders help shape them, have some striking consistencies.

Often I hear people say that Scrum does not take care of risk: there is no risk log, risk is not on the agenda of the Sprint Review or Retrospective as a standard agenda-item. The Developers need to be accountable for the quality of the product and how it's made. And ultimately each role in Scrum h...

Bottom line - Toyota Improvement and Coaching Kata is the perfect partner for flow-based retrospectives.

Bottom line - PSK improves the performance of Scrum teams, but WiP must be optimized for flow and work in progress should not relatively age compared with other in progress items

The purpose of Scrum is to deliver Increments of releasable functionality. So at each Sprint Review, a “Done” Increment is required to make transparent the progress made by the team.

Bottom line - WiP limits must be applied to improve flow of the delivery of value. It's a key lever to improve the performance of Professional Scrum Teams, and it's required by the Kanban Guide for Scrum.

The world is becoming more technologically complex, interdependent, and culturally  diverse, which makes the building of relationships more and more necessary to get things accomplished and, at the same time, more difficult.