Resources

TL; DR: How to Make Agile Work in Fast-Growing Startups For years, I worked in several Berlin-based, fast-growing startups in my capacity as Scrum Master, agile coach, and Product Owner.

A simple model to better understand why and when something is valuable to your team and its stakeholders (in commercial organizations)

Gathering the metrics for Evidence-based Management in software organisations can be a strenuous task and I have a number of customers that are fretting on what to collect and from where.

We are moving toward the "Agile" Transformation. One of our goals is to increase velocities across all our teams by X%. Have you heard this?

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.

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.

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

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 the 2020 Version of the Scrum Guide, the commitments were introduced for each artifact. These then became an element of Scrum; in that they need to be used to gain the maximum value that the Scrum Framework offers. They were always part of a Professional Scrum approach, now there is a clear connection of these commitments to the artifacts. They increase transparency, and the focussed delivery of Value. Each of the commitments now clearly support and sustain an artifact.

A Sprint Planning checklist? How dare you: Agile is a mindset, not a methodology. It is a journey, not a destination. There is no one-size-fits-all approach, and what else could you possibly cover with a checklist, the mother of all standardized processes?

From Scrum Master to Development Team members, this set of questions addresses the foundations of a Scrum Team capability to build valuable products: technical excellence and what it takes to achieve this proficiency level.

A significantly increasing number of companies strive for agility. They intend to progress with agile transformation.

Based on my experience working in agile environments since 2010, I did some research and had general observations on the topic. Regardless of the business domains or product area, there are some common rules that may devastate your efforts toward agility.

During my interactions with my students/ colleagues who play the role of Scrum Master, they tell me that they see gaps in how things are implemented compared to the rules of the Scrum Guide.

TL; DR: 70 Scrum Master Theses The following 70 Scrum Master theses describe the role of from a holistic product creation perspective.

As per Scrum Guide – The Sprint Goal is an objective that will be met within the sprint by implementing the Product Backlog, and it guides the Development Team on why it is building the Increment.

The Daily Scrum is the heartbeat of Scrum. It's a key inspect and adapt opportunity for the Development Team, encouraging them check their progress towards the Sprint Goal and adjust their plan accordingly.

Scrum has proven time and again to be the most popular framework for software development. Given that software is eating the world, a seasoned Scrum Master is nowadays in high demand.

What is up awesome people? In this vlog, I am doing something different to all of my other vlogs. The topic technical debt does not get talked about often in the agile space even though some of the agile manifesto signatories like Ward Cunningham and Martin Fowler have concerns about it. 

The Scrum Values are like a compass guiding us on our journey of using Scrum, while exploring Scrum is a journey in itself....

Twenty questions for you — the new Scrum Master — that fit into a 60 minutes time-box.

Suitable agile metrics reflect either a team’s progress in becoming agile or your organization’s progress in becoming a learning organization.

Scrum has proven time and again to be the most popular framework for software development. Given that software is eating the world, a seasoned Scrum Master is nowadays in high demand.

The focus of this article is on one of the most important things giving lifeblood to the Product Backlog and promoting its characteristic of long-living artifact, the Innovation.

Without skilled developers, the Scrum Framework is no more than lipstick on a pig.

At many customers I visit, I see a lot of effort being put into classification and managing bugs.

“Our problem is that we can’t plan Sprints accurately with velocity,” he said. “Some Sprints, our velocity is really high, in others, we barely achieve anything.”

Scrum is a straightforward framework to develop complex software products in a complex environment but hard to practice.

This seventh article now looks into organizing a remote Sprint Review with a distributed team: How to practice the review with virtual Liberating Structures, including and giving a voice to team members, stakeholders, and customers.

This sixth article now dives into organizing a remote Sprint Planning with a distributed team: practices, virtual Liberating Structures, and lessons learned.

The Scrum Master encourages the Scrum Team to improve, within the Scrum process framework, its development process and practices to make it more effective and enjoyable for the next Sprint.

Facing the COVID-19 pandemic, we are all staying home for the safety of our people. This is a hard time for all of us. While classes are re-scheduled in the Fall, some of us Scrum trainers are refocusing our energy to help the household while others are investigating how to conduct interactive online training.

After covering the Scrum Master and the Product Owner, this article addresses Development Team anti-patterns, covering all Scrum Events as well as the Product Backlog artifact. Learn more about what to look out for if you want to support your fellow teammates.

In this article, we shall investigate why the learning and development of multi-functional specialists in Scrum is the core of organizational Agility and value optimization. Many Development Teams are not collaborating as real teams, but as a collection of narrow specialists focused on "their" tasks (QA, Backend, iOS, Android).

One the questions I get asked during almost every Scrum Master training course is "How do I get the team to engage in the Sprint Retrospectives?".

In this post I‘d like to share an exercise for Scrum Masters to help their Scrum Teams and stakeholders build a deeper understanding of the importance of the Scrum Values and how directly the Scrum Values impact work and value.

Technical debt seems like a topic that resides completely in the domain of a Development Team. They are responsible for delivering a potentially releasable Increment after all. But might there be more to it for a Product Owner?

Sprint Planning is a core event, defining how your customers’ lives will improve with the next Product Increment. Learn more on how to improve its effectiveness by avoiding 20 common Sprint Planning anti-patterns.

How to make Scrum work? Read on to learn more about my top three objectives for Scrum Masters striving to achieve Scrum Mastery.

Should the PO really balance the level of technical debt? I just had this conversation yesterday at Sweden's "big" agile conference, Agila Sverige.

Although I am going to use the term technical debt in this discussion. I am actively forming the opinion that this is the wrong term to be used both in how various assessments assess understanding and by practitioners in the agile community.

Technical debt is a plague on software development in companies big and small. But what is it? What problems does it cause? How can we remove it? Watch this video blog from Robert Pieper, CEO of Responsive Advisors to find out.

The Professional Scrum Master (PSM) workshop has a module that talks about the Definition of "Done" (DoD) and Technical Debt.

Hello awesome people. Today I want to share with you my personal guidelines that I have been using to recruit/hire Scrum Masters from the job market.

Scrum Master anti-patterns: The reasons why Scrum Masters violate the spirit of the Scrum Guide are multi-faceted. They run from ill-suited personal traits and the pursuit of individual agendas to frustration with the team itself.

Decision Maker, which helps the stakeholders and Scrum Team to keep time-to-market short, by keeping decision-making time short.

Is Product Owner accountable for Return on Investment (ROI)? The answer is YES, The Product Owner is accountable for ROI.

Scrum requires a self-organized team to deliver "done" increments at the end of each Sprint. This peculiarity sometimes raises criticisms and questions when it is discussed in trainings or when coaching the clients: how can a team work without a leader? How are we going to do our job, if no one tells us what or how to do it?

A few weeks ago we considered the Agile Manifesto from a lean perspective. We saw that it is possible to map the 12 agile principles to the 7 canonical “Lean Wastes” in terms of a mitigation approach.

Warning - this post is not about Scrum. It is about Technical Debt in my home!!! Please do not judge me!!