Sentiment surveys at the Sprint Retrospective can be an early warning indicator that something is wrong.

Business agility is only possible with technical excellence. Learn more about the twelve success principles of employing a Definition of Done as a quality standard to support your organization’s path to agility.

Let’s harden a popular Scrum Master interview guide in the age of ChatGPT!

Advanced ChatGPT Prompts for Scrum Masters, Product Owners, and Developers

Will Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches soon be replaced with a chatbot? In this ChatGPT job interview, I put OpenAI’s latest generative AI to the test.

In this episode of Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer, PST Jay Rahman will be available answers questions on leadership, Product Ownership, Scrum Mastery and more! (58:14 Minutes)

Is your organization having trouble instilling self-management? Then this is the article for you!

I gotta say, refining work items is usually, by far, the Scrum Team’s least popular activity.  No one gets up in the morning saying, “I can’t wait to refine the Product Backlog!” In this article, we will discuss five reasons why refining your Product Backlog is worth the time.

Understanding the “why” behind the Scrum framework can help Scrum teams improve their ability to deliver value to the organization.  We previously discussed the purpose behind each Scrum event and the purpose behind each Scrum accountability.  In this article, we’ll take a deep dive into the purpose...

​​​​​​​Scrum Teams that understand the “why” behind the Scrum framework can better increase value delivery to the organization. Internalizing the purpose behind the events, artifacts and accountabilities of Scrum allows the team to get the most benefit from them.  In this article, we will discuss th...

Suppose you are looking to fill a position for a Scrum Master (or agile coach) in your organization. In that case, you may find the following 73 interview questions helpful in identifying the right candidate.

In this episode of Ask a PST, Yuval Yeret answers the audience's pressing Scrum questions focused around leadership, how leadership and Scrum Mastery are intertwined, and how leaders can engage with Scrum. Yuval is co-author of the Scrum Guide Companion for Leaders. (57:35 Minutes)

Garbage in, garbage out: Learn about 14 first principles to help your team succeed with an actionable Product Backlog.

10 simple principles of a critical scrum success factor to improve your team’s effectiveness, team spirit, and reputation.

I think of the three accountabilities in the Scrum framework as creating a balance of power.  But what happens when an individual fulfilling one (or more!) of the accountabilities in Scrum gets a bit — um — power hungry?  In this article, we will discuss a few examples of how people fulfilling each ...

Epics and features are complementary Scrum practices that some Product Owners use to organize their Product Backlog. Like a folder structure, they are a convenient way to group PBIs into meaningful groups.

Many people using Scrum today have no formal training or are new to agile frameworks. It’s the perfect environment for myths and misconceptions to spread.

Erfahren Sie mehr darüber, worauf Sie achten sollten, wenn Sie Ihre Teamkollegen, die das Produktinkrement erstellen, auf dem Pfad der kontinuierlichen Weiterentwicklung unterstützen wollen.

Scrum Guide 2020 mentions Sprint Goal and Product Goal because Scrum teams must have a Share Goal. The Share Goal is always essential, even though the Scrum Guide didn't say it before. Basically, the Common Goal helps the Scrum Team become consciously Autonomous. Because Autonomy will lead to chaos ...

Learn more about what to look out for if you want to support your teammates who build the Increment.

Liberate your Sprint Review from being just a demo. There is much more to it than that! I'm sharing eight things you should do in the Sprint Review

The work of solving a complex problem (for example, a feature) with interdependent tasks rarely distributes evenly among the people in a cross-functional team. The solution is a team of multi-skilled specialists. A team of multi-talented people experience fewer bottlenecks as they can help overloade...

In this blog post, I explain the difference between the attitude of a programmer and a product developer, why it matters, and some tips to make the shift.

Fourth blog, in a blog series about the upcoming book: Creating Agile Organizations - A Systemic Approach, by Cesario Ramos & Ilia Pavlichenko.

In this blog post, Sander Dur explains technical debt vs undone work...

Das Sprint Planning ist ein zentrales Scrum-Ereignis, welches entscheidet, wie sich das Leben Ihrer Kunden mit dem nächsten Inkrement verbessern wird. Erfahren Sie mehr darüber, wie Sie Ihren Kunden durch die Vermeidung von 20 gängigen Sprint Planning Anti-Patterns helfen können.

The Scrum Guide doesn't provide a complete list of the skills required for any of the accountabilities on a Scrum Team. For example, it doesn't specify that Developers must use Java or C# code. The Scrum Guide simply states that Developers need all of the skills to deliver a Done increment of produc...

TL; DR: Scrum Master Anti-Patterns The Sprint Planning is a core event that defines how your customers’ lives will improve with the following Product Increment. Learn more on how to improve its effectiveness by avoiding 20 common Sprint Planning anti-patterns. 🇩🇪 Zur deutschsprachigen Versio...

The reasons Scrum Masters violate the spirit of the Scrum Guide are multi-faceted. Typical Scrum Master anti-patterns run from ill-suited personal traits to complacency to pursuing individual agendas to frustration with the team itself.

Scrum is a tactical framework to build products, provided you identify what is worth making in advance. But even after a successful product discovery phase, you may struggle to create the right thing in the right way if your Product Backlog is not up to the job—garbage in, garbage out.

Recently I was asked to answer some questions for a journalist on how to structure IT organizations. The questions were interesting and I wanted to share my responses here.

The Scrum Guide defines Sprint Goal as the single objective for the Sprint, is a commitment by the Developers, and is part of the Sprint Backlog. While many agree the importance of it, equally struggle in creating a good Sprint Goal. So let me share with you how I helped a Scrum Team write a good...

TL; DR: Scrum Master Success — My Top-Nine Indicators How would you know that your Scrum Master is competent? What are indicators for Scrum Master success? Is the regular use of the Confluence retrospective template one of the desired signals? Or is the quest to understand contributing factors fu...

With the rapid increase in the adoption of Scrum and other Agile frameworks over the past several years, I’m not surprised that a few misconceptions and myths about Scrum have surfaced.  While many more organizations embrace Scrum, many individual practitioners have not undertaken formal training.  ...

Misconceptions about Refinement—the process of adding detail, order and size to individual Product Backlog items can be highly detrimental to a team's ability to deliver value to the business frequently. In this article, we will discuss some of the most common myths about Refinement in Scrum.

The Scrum framework comes with its own guardrails and values, but it is worth taking a moment to consider the base upon which Scrum is founded by examining the principles and values of the Agile Manifesto.  The Agile Manifesto includes four values and 12 principles that describe a better way to appr...

The 2020 Scrum Guide includes five values that are important to every successful implementation of Scrum.  These values are courage, commitment, focus, openness and respect. These values don’t get much attention, but the longer I practice Scrum and coach teams, the more important I find them.  This ...

TL; DR: Scrum 2022 — Getting You Started as Scrum Master or Product Owner Probably, you are considering how to further your Scrum Master career or Product Owner career in 2022. Maybe, I can support you in that regard with a set of articles, documents, and LinkedIn polls I authored that proved ...

Surprising insights from scientific studies into when and why code smells are introduced, and practical recommendations for how to write better code

​​​​​​​As a Professional Scrum Trainer, I love working from home, but engaging with others in a remote environment can be challenging. If you’re using Scrum remotely and need stakeholder feedback to order your Product Backlog, here are a few ideas for how to gather it virtually.

​​​​​​​The Sprint Review meeting is one of the Product Owner’s most important events.  But even the most important events can become a little stale over time.  Here are five ideas to spice up your Sprint Review meeting. 

Being a Scrum Master can be tough. You are accountable for helping organisations change the way they approach complex work. If you upset enough of the wrong people you may end up “changing” yourself out of a job.

TL; DR: My Top Ten Worst Scrum Anti-Patterns I recently was invited to a Scrum.org Webinar, and I picked a topic close to my heart: the worst Scrum anti-patterns.

TL; DR: The Obsession with Commitment Matching Velocity Despite decades-long efforts of the whole agile community—books, blogs, conferences, webinars, videos, meetups; you name it—we are still confronted in many supposedly agile organizations with output-metric driven reporting systems. At the he...

What drives you to achieve? Money? Promotion? Skill mastery? Whatever it is that motivates you, that’s okay — be thankful that you are motivated to move forwards. Without motivation in any form, you can personally and professionally stagnate to a point where you become a detractor in a team environm...

If you are looking to fill a position for a Scrum Master (or agile coach) in your organization, you may find the following 54 interview questions useful to identify the right candidate.

On June the 8th Scrum.org hosted a webinar on the subject of using Scrum in Biotech research. The blog addresses unanswered questions from the session

When I first started practicing Scrum, I thought that delivering a done, usable increment each Sprint was the least important part of the framework (spoiler alert: delivering a done, usable increment at least once per Sprint is critically important for reducing risk, enabling faster delivery of busi...

Discover how EBM solves many challenges for Product Owners.

Scrum Master Interview: Demand Creates Supply and the Job Market for Agile Practitioners is No Exception