I did a coaching and training session with a company recently. They're a small, early-stage company in the Greater Boston-area. I got a call from the owner (let's call him Mike) looking for help solving their problems with Team Foundation Server version control. Mike was complained that they were re...

We shall talk about the most important, from my point of view, team’s trait - Helping Each Other. After discussion I will give you a powerful game that can help you to foster and promote real “one for all, all for one” team spirit.

The Scrum.org crew just returned from the Agile 2014 conference in Orlando. The great conversations with attendees were as good as the sessions themselves. There are people doing some truly amazing things with Scrum and software and this conference is a great place to meet up with them. I haven’t...

It's difficult to predict the future despite the techniques we use to try to do just that. The reality is that planning out even a simple software development project is a challenge. There are many different variables to take into account, and therefore, an equal number of reasons for things to go w...

When organizations consider or start adopting Scrum, a frequently raised concern is how ‘to scale Scrum’. It is worthwhile investigating this desire, and start exploring the scalability of Scrum. It seems that many organizations have grown into very complicated and extremely interdependent intern...

‘Evidence-Based Management’ for software organizations promotes evidence-based decision-making in the managerial domain to create a more sustainable business through improved services in turbulent markets and businesses. Scrum.org, which has Scrum as its DNA and empiricism as guiding principle, p...

I have encountered many in the Agile community who love Scrum but seem to hate on the practice of Scrum of Scrums. Others describe their Scrum of Scrums as an overarching meeting of Scrum Masters, or as a meeting for a Product Owner team. In my experience, however, a Scrum of Scrums is a great wa...

The aim to deliver valuable software is a great, core principle of the agile movement. The difficulty however is that ‘value’ in itself is hardly quantifiable. Yet, I do believe it is imperative to think in terms of value in software development and therefore overcome some fluffiness attached to ‘va...

There is this small germ that keeps thriving year after year. Untreated it will bring the organizations it infects to an unheroic death. To check your organizational health, answer these two questions: Do you estimate work in “ideal” hours and do you follow up on your estimates, comparing it to how ...

Every year, organizations spend 4-10% of their revenues on their IT organizations. Value is expected in return for these expenditures. Here, value is defined as the financial benefit that an organization receives for expenditures. When measured, value can encompass an entire organization, or be c...

For reasons of competitiveness the delivery of IT services of Amir Arooni's department (CIO of the Solution Delivery Center for Channels at ING NL) needed fundamental improvements. Amir Arooni, Gunther Verheyen take a look at how this was achieved.

Professional Scrum Trainer Peter Gfader is often asked several question including: How often do you release your product to your end users? How often do your end users see and use your product? Do you release in sync with your Sprint length, after the Sprint Review? Is the Sprint Review meeting the ...

How can my team deliver value and innovation in 24 hours without intervention from management? A "FedEx Day" can be used to show management that just a few people can deliver innovative, working products and software in only 24 hours, and how intrinsic motivators are the key to unlocking our own inn...

Learn more from Professional Scrum Trainer Gunther Verheyen about the distinct views and similiarities between Lean and Agile. Included is the Scrum perspective to Agile to demonstrate how the tangible, yet open framework of Scrum aligns and blends the underlying thinking of Agile and Lean.

Increasing develpoment productivity is a hot topic. This paper by Professional Scrum Trainer Rob Maher focuses on increasing team productivity and discusses how changing a project staffing model can increase the productivity of project teams.

One of the most controversial updates to the 2011 Scrum Guide has been the removal of the term “commit” in favor of “forecast” in regards to the work selected for a Sprint. We used to say that the Development Team commits to which Product Backlog Items it will deliver by the end of the Sprint. Scrum...

Any Product Manager that has successfully delivered a product to a customer knows how incredibly important Release Planning is. Despite its importance, the 2011 Scrum Guide, published in July by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, removes any discussion about Release Planning and the related Release B...

The chicken and pig lore of Scrum is no longer a part of the Scrum Guide. Professional Scrum Trainer Steve Porter discusses the signifigance of what some may assume to be a relatively innocuous change.

In the past, the Scrum Guide consistently used the word "priority" for the Product Backlog or noted that the Product Backlog was “prioritized.” While the Product Backlog must be ordered, ordering by priority is only one many techniques — and rarely the best one at that.

The 2011 Scrum Guide, published earlier this month by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, makes some bold changes regarding the definition and structure of a Sprint Backlog. Professional Scrum Trainer David Starr explains these changes with help from Professional Scrum Trainer Ryan Cromwell.