Stefan Wolpers

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.

There is one product, one Product Owner, one Product Backlog — a simple rule. How is that supposed to scale, you might ask, isn’t that approach turning...

Welcome to the Agile Movers & Shakers interview series. Today’s guest is Ben Linders.

While Diana Larsen continues her coaching, mentoring, and consulting practice in a limited way, she has shifted more toward involvement as a co-founder of the Agile Fluency Project, a startup...

Last week, about 30 members of the Hands-on Agile community in Berlin came together to identify opportunities for personal and professional growth for the coming year, using Liberating Structures’ Ecocycle Planning in the process, to further your Scrum Master career 2020.

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.

What event could better embody Scrum’s principle of empiricism than the Sprint Retrospective? I assume all peers agree that even the simplest retrospective—if only held regularly—is far more useful than having a fancy one once in a while, not to mention having none at all.

TL; DR: The Agile Metrics Survey 2020 Let’s stop guessing and start crowdsourcing data and information on this critical topic: Who is using what metrics under which context to what success? Participate in the agile metrics survey now. Do you want to get this article in your inbox? You can sign up here and join 24k other subscribers. Support the Survey by Sharing Your Learnings Usually, we start an initiative, a project, or a new product by defining what success would look like and how we would learn that we are successful. Which immediately points at metrics of all kinds. This approach is not different for any other attempt to become agile—at least that is the way it should be. I do believe that real data supports any agile transformation — or whatever you like to call it. This is the reason that I propose that we join forces, allocate ten minutes of our lives each to participate in an anonymous survey whose results will be available to everyone, and figure out: Who is using what agile metrics in which context to get a better understanding of how becoming agile is progressing at a team level or within an organization? Instantly, numerous categories of metrics come to mind, such as flow metrics, DevOps metrics, or business metrics, including the corresponding anti-patterns. (What are the worst agile metrics you have heard of or used? My favorite anti-pattern of a useful metric is still story points per developer per Sprint.) Hence previously, I asked for your support to design the survey, and 80 people participated, answering two main questions: What metrics have you used in the past, or are you using now that you consider useful? What metrics do you consider useless, and for what reason? I used the feedback as an additional input to create the Agile Metrics Survey 2020 questionnaire. The questionnaire is comprised of 15 questions and will take about ten minutes to complete. It is anonymous and provided by a Google form. (If your company’s firewall settings prevent you from using in Google form at work, please consider answering it at home.) We need at least 250 answers to provide an acceptable level of validity. I hope to reach that level by the end of January 2020, so that the resulting report should be available by the end of Q1/2020. Now, without further delay, here is the Agile Metrics Survey 2020 questionnaire: Agile Metrics Survey 2020 Design — Related Content Faking Agile Metrics or Cooking the Agile Books. Agile Metrics — The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. The Strange Obsession with Velocity.

Are we still on the right track? Answering this question in a collaborative effort of the Scrum Team as well as internal (and external) stakeholders is the purpose of the Sprint Review. Given its importance, it is worthwhile to tackle the most common Sprint Review anti-patterns.