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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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.