I've been asked several times now about Nexus and SAFe - what are the similarities, differences, etc. If you’re not familiar with either Nexus or SAFe I recommend taking a look at the Nexus Guide and the SAFe whitepaper first.

Many teams are struggling with delivering modern software because they are not building with Test First Principles. Test First gives us the assurance that we have built the correct thing, that what we built is what the customer asked for and that when we change things we don’t break anything inadver...

What is up awesome people? I hope you had an awesome holiday break. As you may have noticed, there have been several changes introduced in Scrum Guide 2020. Scrum no longer emphasizes roles but instead accountabilities...

TL; DR: 11 Proven Stakeholder Communication Tactics - Stakeholder communication: It is simply not enough for an agile product development organization to create great code and ship the resulting product like a clockwork...

Learn more about agile management anti-patterns the aspiring servant leader should avoid during the organization’s transition: From applying the Stage-Gate® approach...

Without skilled developers, the Scrum Framework is no more than lipstick on a pig.

As more and more organisations move towards a higher degree of agility, they inevitably also move towards DevOps practices like Continuous Delivery to facilitate shortening the feedback loops. Firms today experience a much higher velocity of business change. Market opportunities appear or disso...

Sir Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, and Nikola Tesla; this woman and these gentlemen are considered to be some of the greatest scientists of all time.

The Customer Representative Product Owner is the go-to person for people in the organization who want to gain a understanding of what customers (and/or users) are looking for in the product or service which the Product Owner is responsible for.

Visionary Product Owners are people like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Thomas Edison and Winston Churchill.

This blog gives a Lean perspective on the Agile Manifesto.

Esta mañana estaba preparando una megamaleta para viajar durante las próximas semanas a Japón, México, Portugal y Alemania cuando me he encontrado el tuit que puedes leer más arriba.

A few months ago we looked at how teams can optimize flow across the Sprint boundary, a technique which is founded on their ability to make limited and sustainable commitments.

We all know that developing ourselves intellectually requires sustained dedicated effort toward continual learning. We take classes, read books, read from experts online, we find mentors, we collaborate, and many of us learn by teaching others.

"An Agile Coach know more than just Scrum", said one consultant in a boardroom meeting, "he/she knows organisation dynamics, executive coaching and other Agile practices like Kanban and DevOps", he continued.

In this video Richard Hundhausen, Professional Scrum Trainer talks about software delivery as a team, living the Scrum values, and using Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) to plan and execute the work.

In this session, we provide an overview of the Scrum framework, discuss how Scrum enables agility and ways that empiricism can empower the teams that use it.

Hello great people of the world. Welcome back to Professional Software Delivery with Scrum (PSD) blog series with yours truly. This time we're going talk about how to use Scrum And DevOps. I am interested to discuss this topic because it's quite common I get a question from someone in the agile comm...

There is nothing in the Scrum Guide that says that you can't have workflow across the Sprint boundary. I'm going to suggest that not only can you, but you should as long as you don't endanger the Sprint Goal. The definition of Done is an instrumental part of maintaining transparency of the past w...

During some Scrum training classes, I have been asked, can teams practice Continuous Delivery (CD) , using the Scrum Framework? The answer is a resounding yes!   Let's explore why some believe that Scrum only allows you to release at the most, every Sprint against what the Scrum Guide says.   

Everyone building software products today aspire to be able to seamlessly update the production software in a continuous manner. To be able to deploy code without the ‘normal’ friction of process controls, reviews, test departments and committee meetings.

Release Planning As a Product Owner, you are responsible for managing expectations of customers, users and other stakeholders. You are also responsible for Product Backlog Management, for deciding that to built when and what not to built. Also, you'll need to decide what to deliver (release) to cus...

There are a number of things that you have to think about when selecting a modern source control system. Some of that is purely about code, but modern source control systems are about way more than code. They are about your entire application lifecycle and supporting DevOps practices, they are about...

In this post we'll discuss the myth that Scrum Teams at best release working software at the end of a sprint, constraining teams that are capable of releasing faster.

An estimate is our best guess for what can be achieved and by when. There are some situations when estimates are very important: Coordinate dependencies. It can be very useful to know when the team can proceed working on new design if the key expert is temporarily out of office. Align prior...

As the saying goes, it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey. The same could be said about DevOps and its implementation in an organization. Yes, the result is magic since it aims to deliver daily business value, but the journey is even more interesting. This journey is full of organiz...

I have read in several Lean and DevOps sources that the Sprint events imply a kind of waste, so teams are supposed to move to a Continuous Delivery or Kanban lifecycle as they become mature. This post is to discuss that is simply not true, regardless what lifecyle each team chooses as their favourit...

The truth is, worrying about velocity is a trap: it says “we don’t care where we end up, so long as we get there fast.” That’s just wrong. Teams who measure their velocity but don’t or can’t measure customer outcomes may, quite simply, be driving in the wrong direction.

True story - happened in one of my recent Professional Scrum Master workshops. I think had just mentioned that there is no "Sprint Commitment" in Scrum, only a "Sprint Forecast".

To get an insight into people's perception and understanding of something, just look at the social networks. This message coming from a company looking for a lead DevOps makes me ask myself a big question about the perception and understanding of the market about DevOps. But is DevOps real...

If agility is why your organization adopts Scrum, look for more sophistication in employing Scrum. Through Scrum, teams and organizations create the opportunity of having a releasable version of product no later than by the end of each Sprint, where a Sprint takes no more than 4 weeks, and often ...

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer Martin Hinshelwood talks about why DevOps and Continuous Delivery fit nicely with Scrum as complimentary practices and techniques. 3:17 Minutes

"Gross ignorance is 144 times worse than ordinary ignorance" - Bennett Cerf Acceptance Criteria: The conditions under which a piece of work may be held to be complete and fit for potential release. Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD): A development approach in which acceptance crit...

One of the recurring Scrum Myth discussions I have with colleagues, teams new to Scrum and those attending training when comparing Scrum & DevOps relate to a misinterpretation of the following paragraph from the Scrum Guide. At the end of a Sprint, the new Increment must be “Done,” which mean...

Development Team was removed from the Scrum Guide in the 2020 release. However, the ideas expressed in this blog still provide value when understanding the dynamics of the Scrum Team. What are the characteristics of a good Development Team and how does a Development Team evolve when it is using S...

SCRUM IS NOT THE END. IT IS A MEANS TO THE END… The end goal of empirically building strong, self-organizing Scrum Teams to help your business… Increase Sustainable Value Sustainably Decrease Waste & Sustainably Manage Risk It seems quite straightforward, however, ...

Throughout the Agile Alliance 2016 conference, I was struck by a recurring feeling that many people don’t understand what the Sprint Review is.

An overview of documents and books to help understand the accountabilities of Developers on a Scrum Team working in the Software Delivery domain organized by assessment categories.

This glossary represents an overview of terms specific to software development teams using Scrum and agile software development techniques. To learn more about the Scrum framework, we highly recommend that you reference the Scrum Guide™ and the Scrum Glossary. A A/B Testing: extends the ide...

Scaling Scrum. Agile at Scale. Enterprise Everything. Everyone is using the Scaled Agile Framework SAFe. Scaling, Scaling, Scaling. If you’re working in product development, you’ve probably had a few conversations on this topic. It seems to be all the rage right now. In this blog post I hope to len...

Last week I participated in a Product Owner course facilitated by Gunther Verheyen. What triggered me was the part where we discussed the difference between having a project- or product focus. I've seen many organizations, Scrum Teams and especially Product Owners struggle with finding the balance. ...

Recently I wrote an article about the characteristics of a great Product Owner. It gave me the idea to do the same for the Development Team and Scrum Master. This blog post focuses on the Development Team; I'll describe the characteristics, skills and conditions. Great Development Teams... ...

Within companies that use Scrum properly, the organization is built around fixed, cross-functional, self-organizing teams who are given the freedom and responsibility to think of a strategy they believe will result in the best product. Everyone around the Development Team is focused on supporti...

This blog post talks about the issues caused by unlimited budgets.

Recently I read the book 'The People's Scrum' by Tobias Mayer. In this book he spends a chapter on describing the differences between project culture and team culture. To me, the given examples of both types of culture are highly recognizable and I can easily extend and complement the list of exampl...

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...

I was coaching a number of teams and their Sprint Reviews were boring status meetings and few stakeholders attended. I see this pattern often at companies and a reason for poor stakeholder attendance is that the discussion about added value happens in other meetings. In this post I want to share a l...

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...

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 ...