This week I facilitated a Scrum Master training in which we gathered the most common pitfalls of the Scrum events. It resulted in a nice overview with lots of recognizable pitfalls. In this blog post I'll share the results with you, completed with some ideas of my own. As you will see, it's only a b...

According to the Scrum guide, sprint retrospectives are "an opportunity for the Scrum Team to inspect itself and create a plan for improvements to be enacted during the next Sprint." In my early career as a Scrum Master, I used to follow this definition quite stricly. Time was taken to look for o...

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...

This blog is part of my series on “Agile Trojan Horses – Covert Appetizers for Agile Discovery”. This series helps spark conversations that restore focus on Agile Fundamentals, whet the appetite to discover more about Agile and help apply Agile in day-to-day decision-making. I am writing this b...

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...

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...

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 ...