With the holiday season in full gear, many of us start crafting one or more New Year’s resolutions: A secular tradition … in which a person makes a promise to do an act of self-improvement…beginning on New Year’s Day. What are some of your resolutions? Spend less and save more? Get fit?...

He could have wept tin tears, but that would not have been right. He looked at her and she looked at him, but neither spoke a word. (Hans Christian Andersen, The Brave Tin Soldier]). We raise our children and teach them to be "The Brave Tin Soldiers" that express only the “right” feelings, ha...

This is what you might know as the daily ‘stand up.’ It is the most abused, tortured and mistreated meeting in Scrum. Or not even Scrum. If nothing else, this is usually the part of Scrum that organizations adopt and keep. If they do nothing else then they do this. And boy do they do it! This ...

My name is Peter Götz. I am an experienced software engineer. I started in 2001 and have worked in several projects and with several teams since then. Besides actually developing software I have also prepared and conducted several technical trainings (Java, JBoss, OOAD) for developers. For more than...

In this webcast, David Dame shares strategies he has used for successfully implementing and integrating shared specialized resources (performance, UX), distributed teams, and balancing resourcing between new feature development and maintenance/escalation work.

I want to tell you about a simple but extremely effective tool that definitely can find its unique place in the toolbox of any Scrum Master, Agile Coach or Trainer. The tool I’m talking about is a set of postcards or photographs. But let’s start with a small backstory. During the last year I ...

One of the key foundations of helping your business become Agile is the use of empiricism. Empiricism is the scientific approach based on evidence, where any idea must be tested against observations, rather than intuition. Empiricism is based on three pillars: transparency, inspection and adaptation...

Traditionally an individual is declared a ‘manager’ when having hierarchical control over other individuals. There are many sorts of power that come with it. A traditional manager assigns work, follows up on the execution of the work, is responsible for the results, judges and assesses the people...

There is a wonderful game from our childhood. I think many people have played it. The groups chooses one person who turns away and says: The sea is rough - one. The sea is rough - two. The sea is rough - three.(Children at this time depict the fermenting sea.) Sea figure, stop dan...

Do you like drinking a cup (glass) of tea? Ever had a tea bag that was torn? Spreading tea leaves in your tasty drink? Then you know that such leaves circulate wildly and chaotically throughout your tea when you stir it, add water, or drink it. Science is somewhat more precise about the behav...

There is a question that is asked many times during our Introduction to Agile course, usually about half way through when the potential of these techniques has become clear but the practicalities of applying them have begun to raise doubts. The same question is asked by people who award contract...

Find out with a short test? A single instance of Scrum has one Scrum Team that works from one Product Backlog. The team sprints against the selected Product Backlog items and creates an increment of potentially shippable, or usable, functionality by the end of the Sprint If you want to test yo...

“A Scrum Master’s practical toolbox” offers options, options from which Scrum Masters can select, and increase their understanding of their role as well as how the role was designed (Gunther Verheyen Directing the Professional Scrum Series, Scrum.org). It so happened that I carefully filled out t...

When I first started doing Scrum I was focused on project delivery. As a software professional I wanted to find better ways of delivering customer value and Scrum made total sense to me. But as I applied Scrum, I started to realise that Scrum isn't actually about delivery; it is about change. Now...

I am sitting in in a café in Singapore enjoying a well-deserved drink and dinner after teaching day 1 of the Scrum.org Professional Scrum Product Owner course. We have students from Indonesia, Singapore and Cambodia on the course. We have spent much of the first day chasing the idea of value...

Jeff Sutherland and I have helped hundreds of organizations scale their projects, enable their entire product development, and thread Scrum through their organizations. For sure, none of them were easy, and each had its own unique challenges. Each had its own structure, culture, goals and strategies...

I decided to conduct a Temperature Reading Sprint Retrospective after watching the video from one of the workshops of a famous American family therapist Virginia Satir. The concepts and ideas of Virginia are used far beyond the field of family therapy. Scrum is a lightweight and flexible framewor...

People love stories. We love telling and listening to interesting stories. The need for this is embedded deeply by the nature. The first stories were told by our ancestors and can be seen in the preserved rock paintings. Paleontologists found them in caves around the world. They depict animals, hunt...

Software is created by people; for better or for worse. That is very different from looking at software development as a robotizeable activity. The agile worldview builds on software development being a creative activity (not: industrial) undertaken by and for people (not: replaceable pieces of mach...

I have found that coaching managers is a different approach than with Scrum teams. While you are (most of the time) involved directly with the Scrum Team as a Scrum Master, managers are less accessible. They have other meetings, which you are not invited to. They might not visualize their work like ...

On more than one occasion over the years, I have encountered software development teams that are working day and night on a "challenged" project - both waterfall *and* Scrum. Perhaps you have lived through one of these situations: a long project that is behind schedule, over budget, and over-stresse...

There is a fundamental change in management happening under out feet that is challenging the very need for strategy. Small changes are happening every day and in ten years’ time we won’t recognise management as we have thought of it in the past. In his the landmark HBR article Moon Shots for Mana...

Your plan. It will change anyway. Your detailed architecture. It should emerge. Your code. It will be refactored. Your document. It doesn’t compile anyway.

I work with a lot of companies to help them to improve their development processes and to either adopt Scrum or improve how they’re currently doing Scrum. Lately, I’ve noticed that a fair number of companies run into problems with a certain kind of project: The Rewrite Project. On this kind of p...

In 1995, the first codified version of Scrum was made public. In 2010, the co-creators of Scrum, Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, described the roles and rules of Scrum in the Scrum Guide. The Scrum Guide is globally recognized as the definite body of knowledge to Scrum. The value of the Scrum G...

At Scrum.org, we sometimes dare to talk about our what we do as “bringing humanity to work.” Sometimes I get reminded this idea is more than hyperbole or aggrandizing. This week I was a guest speaker at a small symposium on DevOps in my hometown of Seattle. I spoke about Scrum.org’s take on...

Recently I was involved in a discussion with Scrum.org trainers regarding the question “What is a failed Sprint?" I think we came to the same opinion and the same answer. And, in your opinion, what a failed Sprint is: If the team doesn’t complete all the forecasted Product Backlog ...

Dan Sloan introduces the pillar of transparency in Scrum and will navigate you through a journey of successes and challenges he’s encountered in his years of coaching and training Scrum teams around the globe.

I am a Scrum Trainer with Scrum.org. I work with lots of organizations to help them become more agile. I see a lot of bad Scrum. More than my fair share. Sometimes I see so much bad Scrum that it makes me question why I do this. This post is my attempt to remind myself why. What is bad Scrum...

Today we are pleased to announce the release of ScrumGuides.org, a branding-free website providing the single authoritative definition of Scrum. For the last several years, Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, the original creators of Scrum, have worked together to maintain the rules of Scrum in t...

You need quality enablement to achieve predictable delivery for your organisation which takes effort to achieve. I do a lot of ALM Assessments for companies and almost every customer that I speak to has unpredictable quality in the software delivery that they receive from their teams. This is not...

In a recent Scrum training class, I had a group of skilled and experienced software Product Managers (from a few different companies) who had, earlier in their careers, worked as sales professionals in the field – so they had a deep understanding of the traditional sales professional “minds...

I was talking to a friend the other day. She was looking for a job as a Scrum Master. Her background is technical and the last year or so she has been working as a professional coach. Not in IT that is. Just helping people to think and grow. We came to talk about if she should include her c...

Many companies have started searching for self-organisation. That ideal or nirvana where teams can figure out how to work together effectively with limited or little direction to solve problems. Many, including some of my colleagues, believe that this search for self-organisation is ultimate...

I work in the public sector as an Agile coach. One of the question I often get asked is how to estimate the size of a new project, or a new delivery, as we need to determine a budget before executing it. One practice that has proven useful for this in my work experience is what I call the wall se...

Scrum.org holds a consistently high quality bar for our instructors. The result is a tremendously mature and capable cadre of experts working together to realize our shared mission of improving the profession of software development. The full list of of our PSTs (Professional Scrum Trainers) is here...

Does your company culture resemble Survivor? Do you have a culture in your organisation where individuals that help others are considered slackers for not getting their own assignments complete? If you are trying to achieve agility it is imperative that your team members work together to solve ...

One of the important event in Agile this year seems to be an argument around Test Driven Development (TDD). More precisely, high profile personalities in our industry debated against the statement "TDD is dead". Initially launched by David Heinemeier Hansson at the RailsConf keynote, it created quit...

Did you know that the DOD has made it illegal to do waterfall? For the first time in many years the Department of Defence (DOD) in the United States had made a major update to its procurement rules. They can no longer be held accountable for holding up our industry, and being culpable for its inabil...

The simple cycle of trying, inspecting, and adapting must be as old as mankind. Can’t you just picture Homo Erectus learning to control fire? I bet scorched fingers and cold nights were fairly common for a millennia or so while we refined the art of spark and tinder.

] Volunteers at the Port Of San Diego - Operation Clean Sweep 2013 Think about this: If everyone in your organization could do whatever they wanted at work, would they do anything differently compared to today? If so, your organization is in big trouble! Why? Because that means that...

As a Agile coach, I refer to a few tools to help me think about where my Scrum teams should go next on their path to Agility. One of these tools is the Agile subway map, a list of Agile practices grouped in different categories. It helps me think how a specific practice could help a team solve its a...

Recently I gave a talk on the ScrumDayEurope 2014 conference. The talk was about how you can use game principles in combination with evidence based management (EBM) in your agile adoption. One of the hard points in evidence based management is that people tend to ignore evidence when that evidence c...

A month has passed since the FIFA World Cup finals! With that, a number of less successful football coaches are probably looking for new jobs... But as the disappointed countries ditch their old coaches, they will most probably hire a new one right away. It seems that for elite...

A few weeks ago I headed out to the Scrum.org offices in Boston to participate in training to hone my skills as an Evidence-based Management Consultant. I was talking to my father about it when I got back and was surprised that he recognised many of the practices and tools. In the 1990's my fat...

A common challenge for businesses developing new products is having a coherent and universal understanding of what the value proposition for the organisation is.

Story Points - An Introduction The scrum guide tells us that estimates should be provided by people that will be doing the work but it doesn’t tell us how we should provide estimates. It leaves that decision to us. A common tactic used by scrum teams is to estimate using a unit of measurement r...

Mark Noneman discusses  how the phrase “technical debt” has become a commonly used phrase in software development.

Collaboration is the key to successful agile product development. A community of practice is a technique that helps us achieve this. Inspired by the Agile Conference in Orlando in July I visited the Kennedy Space Center close to Cape Canaveral to marvel at good old Space Shuttle Atlantis. Watchin...

The Scrum.org blog is branching out to include our entire expert community! Now, readers will get more than the occasional formal article. The collective wisdom of all 150-ish Scrum.org Experts will be streaming to you on a regular basis. Help Seed the Content The Scrum.org community has some ...