Arguably the most famous role in Scrum is the Scrum Master. But for those new to Scrum, it’s a bit of a mystery what a Scrum Master does day to day – here are five things that Scrum Masters do.

This blog post discusses how the Circles of Improvement from the book by Stephen R. Covey: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, work in Scrum.

If you are looking to fill a position for a Product Owner in your organization, you may find the following 71 interview questions useful to identify the right candidate.

We’ve already discussed the importance of decentralised command and decision-making in an earlier blog, outlining how managers need to be able to train, mentor and teach their teams.

When people form a Scrum Team they have to figure out how to become a real team, rather than a collection of individuals. The Scrum Team Charter Canvas is a helpful tool to facilitate Scrum Team formation.

Complaining is like releasing gas. It’s a natural occurrence. Everyone does it. But no one wants someone else to do it next to them. How to complain less and do more by Sahin Guvenilir.

In an agile context, we use metrics to set performance goals, measure current conditions, define small improvement experiments and measure the effectiveness of the experiments in order to inspect and adapt goals and determine the next steps.

Join me and explore the reasons and the consequences of this Sprint anti-pattern in 109 seconds.

Want to be ready for that tough Scrum Master interview? Here are 52 questions from the team at www.FractalSystems.co.uk that will help you really ace the upcoming interview and give you confidence during your Scrum Master interview.

Are agile and Scrum the same thing? Learn about the difference from the team at www.FractalSystems.co.uk

Does an organization live in the present or in the past? The answer seems obvious: of course in the present! But what if organizations are living in the past? How that night be the case and what can bring the organization back to the present? Let's dive deeper into this questions.

Join me and explore the reasons and the consequences of this Sprint Retrospective anti-pattern in 83 seconds...

In their book Agile Retrospectives, Esther Derby and Diana Larsen popularized the idea that a Sprint Retrospect comprises five stages. The second stage refers to gathering data so that the Scrum Team can have data-informed Retrospectives.

On today’s episode of YOUR DAILY SCRUM: Can the Scrum Team skip their Sprint Retrospective?

On today’s episode of YOUR DAILY SCRUM: Can the Scrum Team skip their Sprint Retrospective?

TL; DR: A Sprint Review without Stakeholders? There are plenty of failure possibilities with Scrum. Given that Scrum is a framework with a reasonable yet short “manual,” this effect should not surprise anyone. A Sprint Review without stakeholders may create an unhealthy bubble for the Scrum Team ...

TL; DR: Three Wide-Spread Scrum Master Failures There are plenty of Scrum Masters failures. Given that Scrum is a framework with a precise and concise yet short “manual,” this effect should not surprise anyone. Learn more about three widespread examples of how Scrum Masters fail their team in ...

4 Do-it-yourself workshops to improve how your team uses metrics and how to measure the things that really matter!

I've given the same advice to almost all of my clients -- "you need a clearer Product Backlog", "You're working really hard but you're not getting anything done", and "You need to cut scope, launch your product with a more focused scope, launch it, and then get feedback." ...

Companies have shifted to long-term remote work and employees across many different industries are accepting that the pre-pandemic workplace will not come back. I call this "radical remote".

Scrum’s what I got, My agile school of thought, Definitely give it a shot

Some time ago, someone on Reddit asked whether there would be any other profession that requires attending a 2-day training class and would then pay as well as a Scrum Master job.

A few weeks ago, Scrum.org hosted a webinar on Product Backlog anti-patterns, which left several questions unanswered as we ran out of time. In this blog post, Stefan Wolpers answers those questions.

Peer Recruiting is the new hiring: Shortly, all creative, technology-based organizations will need to abandon the command & control structures that served the industrial world of the 20th century so well. Instead, they will reorganize themselves around autonomous teams to deal with the complexity an...

Why perfect is the enemy of good - using lean change to apply agile in context

Use the do-it-yourself workshops to improve how your Scrum Team uses Product- and Sprint Goals.

Garbage in, garbage out: Learn more on how a piece of paper and a pencil can turn around the perception of your Scrum Team among stakeholders and customers.

Like a job ad for a Scrum Master position, the equivalent for the Product Owner position also reveals excellent insight into an organization’s progress on becoming agile.

I sat, as an observing consultant, in my third Retrospective of the day. I noticed high energy and openness as the room's buzz showed me signs that this team was genuinely collaborative...

This blog post describes some lessons that I learned from facilitating a retrospective in a real prison for a group of my cellmates, political prisoners.

I'm hearing from more and more companies that are using the Entrepreneurial Operating System® (EOS®) and are also looking at or practicing Agile e.g. using Scrum. In discussions with these companies two key questions surface time after time: My teams want to use Agile/Scrum - is that...

I've been asked several times now about Nexus and SAFe - what are the similarities, differences, etc. If you’re not familiar with either Nexus or SAFe I recommend taking a look at the Nexus Guide and the SAFe whitepaper first.

When I made the transition from traditional project management to agility and Scrum, I was excited to step out of the chaos and feel more purpose in my daily work.

While the new Scrum Guide is less prescriptive and more inclusive, it also ties loose ends by including elements better, namely the previously free-floating Sprint Goal and the Definition of Done with the creation of Scrum commitments. This inclusion works remarkably well in the former’s case; regar...

Many organisations wrestle with the seeming incompatibility between agile and release management, and they struggle with release planning and predictable delivery.

In my last post about Professional software teams creating working software David Corbin made a good point. How do you determining what “Free from fault or defect” means? Since that is different for each Product and may change over time you need to focus on Quality and reflecting that quality in a D...

There is a better way than staggered iterations for delivery that will keep you on the path to agility. Staggered iterations lead to more technical debt and lower quality software.

As 2020 comes to an end, you are probably considering how to further your career as a Scrum Master or Product Owner in 2021.

Together with my colleagues Uwe Schirmer and Kurt Bittner, I have compiled a book that contains many of our own stories and those we experienced while working with customers and students: The Professional Scrum Team. Maybe they provide value to you. 

It's totally okay that you spent, the weekend eating, drinking and making merry. That's what festivals are for. But don't undermine the power of jumping right back on track.

TL;DR: The Scrum Product Owner in 58 Theses The following 58 Product Owner theses describe the PO role from a holistic product creation perspective. They cover the concept of the Product Owner role, product discovery, how to deal with external and internal stakeholders, product portfolio and p...

The 2020 version of Scrum Guide was released recently and everyone is talking about the changes been made in it and how it is going to impact their current ways of working as compared to its previous version.

If you are looking to fill a position for a Product Owner in your organization, you may find the following 71 interview questions useful to identify the right candidate.

In this post, we describe one tiny experiment that can create big shifts in how teams experience the Scrum Events and the decisions they make during them.

On November 18, 2020, Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland released an updated version of the Scrum Guide. In this blog post, I will share what you need to know about the 2020 Scrum Guide. I will start with the most important things you need to know, and then I’ll get into a little more nuance for the S...

Sprint Retrospective is the last Scrum event within a Sprint. During this event entire Scrum Team- Scrum Master, Product Owner & Development Team inspects the Sprint and decides how to improve the next Sprint.

Scrum is described as a framework, not a methodology. The Scrum Guide provides just enough prescription to allow Scrum to work and encourages its ‘users’ to be smart, adding practices and other things specific to them on top of the framework as needed to form their process.

A reflection on four key changes in the 2020 Scrum Guide, why they were made, and why that is a big deal

TL; DR: The Scrum Guide 2020-The Scrum Guide 2020 is available now: Change is coming to make Scrum more accessible and inclusive beyond software development.

Pour le 25ème anniversaire de Scrum, ses co-créateurs, Jeff Sutherland et Ken Schwaber nous livrent le millésime 2020 du Guide Scrum. Cette version améliorée, réduite à 13 pages est à la fois plus simple et moins prescriptive. Scrum abandonne les termes dédiés à l’informatique pour développer un voc...