What has served me well over the years is a combination of observation and asking questions. Congratulations on your new Scrum Master position! Now what?

If you’ve ever wondered whether Scrum can work for hard deadlines, the answer is – yes!  Not only can Scrum work in these situations, but in my experience, using this agile framework increases the probability of meeting challenging  deadlines.

Technical Debt can be a difficult concept for people to understand, so lets try a metaphor. 

I was blessed with a partner who, on top of his skills as Agile coach, is a gifted graphic facilitator...

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. While it is common to first look outside our team for impediments, such as dysfunctional processes or other systemic issues,

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.

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. One failure symptom of a botched agile transformation is the frustrated Scrum Master.

Contrary to popular belief, the Scrum Master success principles are tangible, when we guide the analysis with an outside perspective. Read on and discover four Scrum Master success principles: From when not to use Scrum to product quality to supporting the Product Owner to putting self-management...

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.

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. They are derived from my fourteen years of practical experience with XP and Scrum, serving both as Product Owner and Scrum Master ...

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.

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...

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. These are my lessons learned on making ‘agile’ — including Scrum as a framework — work in a fast-growing start...

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. Here I try to create an understanding of the ‘what’ that we need to collect. Updated to reflect the 2020 Scru...

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 conne...

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.

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.

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

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 onlin...

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...

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.