​​​​​​​In my previous blog post 'The 9 Smells of an Organization' I described the difference between the terms commitment and forecast. This resulted in an intriguing discussion that triggered me to elaborate some more on this topic and share the highlights of this conversation.

Are you considered an authoritative "leader" in your organization? Do you spend your day at the top of the tower or in the trenches? Real Agile leaders abandon the top of the tower and thoughtfully empower an organization from the trenches, which fuels the connections that lead to high-performing Ag...

A lot of people talk about scaling Agile. It’s all the rage nowadays. Everyone wants to scale Agile. But what does that actually mean? What does it imply? What are the underlying assumptions? Capital-A Agile When people refer to capital-A Agile, mostly they are referring to the value stateme...

A few months ago I first saw the brilliant speech 'The Smell of the Place' by Prof. Sumantra Ghoshal. It's about corporate environments and the faults of management in creating a positive work place.

When Scrum is introduced in a company, most of the time, the development team embraces it with lots of enthusiasm. Scrum embodies self-organizing, autonomous, multidisciplinary teams that acknowledge individual qualities and reinforces the strengths of the team as a whole. Who doesn't want to be par...

The role of a Scrum Master is one of many stances and diversity. A great Scrum Master is aware of them and knows when and how to apply them, depending on situation and context. Everything with the purpose of helping people understand and apply the Scrum framework better. In a series of blog posts...

The subject of this blog post might seem unusual. But having worked with multiple development teams, I've gained some experience with team members having (symptoms) of Asperger's. I mostly contributed to the team as a Scrum Master or Agile Coach. The combination of Scrum and Asperger's hereby always...

Before I begin, I have to make sure you’re not fixed on a misconception. The Daily Scrum is not a status meeting, nor a report back to the team. It’s a planning event. You can read some more here: [What is The Daily Scrum for?] Years back, in the beginning of my adventures with Scrum, I worked ...

In this blog, an overview of the professional QA as a quality coach for a cross-functional team is discussed.

When do you use Nexus?

The story of the Wygat Weed Whacker goes back many years – to the time we bought our first home in the beautiful town of Allen, TX.

Southern Fried Agile is the premier Agile event in Charlotte NC. It is a one day, content delivering, network creating conference with a focus on community and people talking. And I was lucky enough to be asked to present the keynote the last two years. This has given me the opportunity to ...

A lack of defined engineering practices, standards and tooling is an often observed problem in software development, regardless of whether Scrum is used. It reflects the appalling lack of attention to technical excellence in our software development industry. In a context of Scrum, it is even more e...

Many years ago I was told to be successful you have to have a personnel mission, a clear, short statement that says what you are all about. And mine is ‘to help people deliver software just a little bit better’. Actually this mission has changed from its inception with the addition of the words ‘jus...

Just like how the Development Team role and Scrum Master role that can be easily misunderstood, the Product Owner is also easily misunderstood by organisation who are using Scrum. Over and over again I see people who are assigned as Product Owner are not really a Product Owner, either they ...

This blog post is about a little box. A little transparent box. The box contained only one sticky note. A sticky note with a milestone. The milestone belonged to a large project that concerned a comprehensive organizational change with multiple Scrum teams. This milestone was special, because it ...

Although the Daily Scrum seems to be a simple and straightforward event, I still encounter a lot of teams struggling with it. In this blog post, I'll share my tips & tactics. You can use it as a checklist for your own Daily Scrum, and hopefully, it helps you ensure the event to become (or stay) ...

I notice how many people struggle when they try to improve their understanding of Scrum. I notice it in classes, on forums, at conferences, through mail. They look for detailed instructions. They ask universal questions that demand exact and precise answers. How long should Sprint Planning b...

This webinar is a beginning to understanding the latest buzzword DevOps in the context of scrum.

Update: after receiving some valuable feedback, I've added the third lesson learned. The previous week I used the Spotify Squad Health Check model to assess a team's situation and condition. One of the cards the game contained caused quite a lot of discussing during the retrospective and also ga...

Have you ever seen a Sprint Backlog that can be reused across Sprints? I have! A reusable Sprint Backlog contains obvious tasks, like for example ’write code’, ‘make test scripts’ , ‘execute test cases’, 'investigate' and so on. These tasks are too trivial to be useful and undermine one of the fu...

The concept of user stories is a well-known tool for describing requirements. In a simple format, it captures the ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘why’ of a requirement. User stories have their roots in Extreme Programming (XP) and are an often-used tactic within Scrum. In 2001, Ron Jeffries proposed the Three C’...

GREAT DALLAS ICE STORM OF 2013 I think it was the winter of 2013. I was at the Scrum.org headquarters in Boston, attending training on Evidence Based Management. On the last day of the training, as we were wrapping up, I got an automated call from American Airlines - my flight ...

This blog is the sequel to my earlier blog - Enterprise Agile Transformation Part 1 - The Story of BB Watt's Lawn Service. In Part 1, I told you the story of my friend Walt and how he got fired as the President of his HOA. WALT'S PENANCE After being fired, Walt was in the doldrums. I fo...

The role of a Scrum Master is one of many stances and diversity. A great Scrum Master is aware of them and knows when and how to apply them, depending on situation and context. Everything with the purpose of helping people understand and apply the Scrum framework better.

WALT'S CHALLENGE One of my friends - Walt, is the HOA President for a community of about 500 homes. Although it is a safe and beautiful community, they are undergoing a transition - many of the residents are empty-nesters who want to sell their homes, down-size and move to their retirement ho...

The Scrum Guide begins the description of the role of the Product Owner as follows: The Product Owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the product and the work of the Development Team. How does a Product Owner do this? Which instruments does Scrum offer to achieve this? How can a P...

There’s an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love... I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been. Similarly, an organization must focus the business around tomorrow’s customer, not today’s customer. The organization must continually learn from its customers to guide the...

A pair of recent findings from the Standish Group confirm the astonishing success and cost savings of Agile approaches over waterfall. In the "Chaos Report 2015", Standish found that large Agile projects are 6X more successful than waterfall projects. While Standish doesn't get specific on what ...

The role of a Scrum Master is one of many stances and diversity. A great Scrum Master is aware of them and knows when and how to apply them, depending on situation and context. Everything with the purpose of helping people understand and apply the Scrum framework better.

This is the final post in a three part series. Please like, share,and/or comment. Please click here for Part 1 and here for Part 2. Suppose you have a persistent group in your organization who has been completing its job the same way for a significant period of time. They refuse to change despite...

Learning, responsibility and power - the three psychological models very useful in a Scrum Master's daily work.

This is the second post in a three part series. Please like, share and commentand I’ll be sure to update you when the next post in the series comes out. When implementing an agile transformation, do you start from the top or bottom of the organization? My experience has shown it is best to take a...

The role of a Scrum Master is one of many stances and diversity. A great Scrum Master is aware of them and knows when and how to apply them, depending on situation and context. Everything with the purpose of helping people understand and apply the Scrum framework better.

Through my years of trial and error, I have learned there is no one size fits all solution to transitioning organizations to agile...context is king! Every model is based on different organizational contexts. Each model’s context has its own starting and ending point. There’s no guarantee that y...

The role of a Scrum Master is one of many stances and diversity. A great Scrum Master is aware of them and knows when and how to apply them, depending on situation and context. Everything with the purpose of helping people understand and apply the Scrum framework better.

VersionOne does an annual "State of Agile Development" survey and publishes the results for the cost of your email address. Thanks VersionOne! I recently read through the 9th annual survey results for 2015, and there's lots of good, useful data there. For now I want to highlight the top five reas...

The role of a Scrum Master is one of many stances and diversity. A great Scrum Master is aware of them and knows when and how to apply them, depending on situation and context. Everything with the purpose of helping people understand and apply the Scrum framework better. In a series of blog posts...

Professional Scrum Trainer Gunther Verheyen looks at how numerous organizations worldwide have adopted Scrum to become more agile. Many of them have engaged in endeavors to scale their product development done through Scrum. None of these efforts are easy, and each effort faces specific challenges.

Scrum is a framework for complex systems development. Scaled Scrum is any instance of Scrum involving more than one team creating and sustaining a product or system. Scaled Professional Scrum is any instance of scaled Scrum that thrives on Scrum’s formal rules and roles, complemented...

If you have seen the TV documentary series Hoarders which depicted the real-life struggles of people who suffer from compulsive hoarding. Some victims suffered so severely that they were often drowning within their own filth. The disorder is immediately obvious to family and friends. Similarly, o...

The Scrum Guide requires that the Product Owner ensure that "key stakeholders" attend the Scrum Sprint Review, but who are these "key stakeholders"? According to the Scrum Glossary, a stakeholder is "a person external to the Scrum Team with a specific interest in and knowledge of a product that...

The Scrum Master is an amazing and at the same time very challenging role. He needs to have different skills, and depending on the situation put on a teaching, training, facilitating or a coaching hat. Furthermore, each of those skills is very difficult to master. People may spend their entire p...

Is there a way to help organizations move from a Change Transformations mindset to a Continuous Change mind set? Traditionally, organizations implement large scale change events within their organization by spontaneously have an epiphany and transform every few years. The frequency of these tr...

The Standish Group's "Chaos Report 2015" was recently published. Standish gathers data from projects done across a variety of industries. They present the data in buckets of "successful, challenged, or failed" projects. I'd like to highlight my two key learnings after reading the 2015 Chao...

In Jeff Haden's recent post entitled "The One Attitude Every Successful Person Has", I was struck at how aligned this attitude is with the Agile Mindset. What do you think? An Agile Mindset... essential for healthy Scrum...is not reserved for specific people - rather, this is the attitude that anyon...

The proliferation of scaling frameworks shows there are real challenges in scaling agility, and the solutions don’t seem to involve inventing yet more frameworks or formal processes. So then, why is it so hard to find success in agility at scale?

Father's Day offered an annual moment for me to reflect on the journey of a humble and influential man whose life was tragically cut short in 2002 - my Dad. Although it has been a number of years since his passing, he continues to shape my mindset in meaningful and profound ways. I hope all of ou...

Recently discussing design and programming with an external programmer, he explained me his approach of defensive programming. But before going in detail of his explanations, Wikipedia help us to define the defensive programming: Defensive programming is a form of defensive design intended to en...

The Scrum Master role can easily be misunderstood as it is harder to grasp by reading the theory; hence people often compare the Scrum Master role to Project Manager or Technical Leader. Scrum Master's primary job is to place himself in service consciously, with self-awareness, and for the benefit o...