One of the key Kanban practices is Limiting Work in Progress. If you want to be pedantic, actually what this practice aims for is Reducing and stabilizing Work in Progress. This improves flow, provides predictability, and is actually even more important for creating a pull-based Kanban system than v...

In the Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams and the Professional Scrum with Kanban workshop, we introduce 4 key flow metrics that we believe Scrum teams can use to improve their flow.

Do your team members have a tendency to pick up the next task to work on in case they get stuck with current task because they are measured for ‘utilization’? Such multitasking isn’t just bad, but also has harmful effects and causes stress on the person as proven by a study at Stanford University.

Prove Your Knowledge of Using Scrum with KanbanDelivering products is complex work and for more than 25 years, people have been using Scrum to do so. Scrum is a framework in which you add practices that make sense for your Scrum Team or organization to build and define your overall process. Kanban ...

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...

We regularly work with teams that see the Daily scrum as irrelevant, disruptive, and boring. They are often right. Here are three common anti-patterns and three potential solutions.

It’s been so exciting to hear so much positive feedback and interest in the new Scrum.org Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams and the accompanying Professional Scrum with Kanban class. Creating the class and guide together with Daniel (Vacanti) & Steve (Porter) and then working on getting it to market ...

Work is complex, and to honour the empirical approach is harder. It requires trust, in order to be transparent. To enable the responsiveness that agile promises there needs to be discipline and rigour.

In this episode of Agile.FM, host Jochen Krebs talks with Steve Porter who is a Professional Scrum Trainer on staff, working closely with the PST community at Scrum.org where he is also responsible for the curriculum.

Is it possible to use Scrum with Kanban? After a year of exploring the idea and working out the details, our answer is yes. Get ready to make your team stronger and more effective.

Today we announced a new class Professional Scrum With Kanban. This class helps teams practicing Scrum to apply the practices of Kanban without breaking Scrum. It shows how visualization and flow are great partners in delivering Done software and how Scrum with Kanban helps teams become more profess...

In this class, students will learn how their Scrum Teams can introduce complementary practices from Kanban while continuing the way they are already working with Scrum, all without changing Scrum.

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...

In this article we'll bust one of the more radical myths in Scrum; the belief that plans and planning have no place in Scrum.

"See it all. See it fairly. Be truthful, be sensible and be careful with language" - Henry Grunwald In Scrum we care about the precise and considered use of language, since any obfuscation reduces transparency. When we try to implement Scrum, we can sometimes find that the pressure is on to c...

In this blog post we’ll bust the myth that “The Scrum Master is a junior Agile Coach”. Effective change is driven from “the inside-out”. The Scrum Master - being part of the Scrum Team  - is in a better position to facilitate this change than an (external) Agile Coach.

There is no improvement without learning According to Steven Spear, there is no improvement without learning. There is no learning without surprises. There are no surprises without setting expectations. Specifically challenging expectations that will be missed occasionally. See a quote from ...

System optimization: Upgrading Team Competencies When developing complex innovative products, the Development Team will have different a workload for each one of their members. The speed of the entire Development Team is often limited by the speed of the specialist with peak loads. To overcome th...

"Perfection has to do with the end product, but excellence has to do with the process." - Jerry Moran Scrum requires a Product Backlog and a Product Owner to account for the value of product increments. For as long as a product exists, a Product Backlog will exist to describe the work which o...

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.

These slides from the ScrumPulse Webinar: Scrum and Kanban: Make your teams better by busting common myths

Last time I talked about the Ghana Police Service (GPS) I was talking about Professional Organisational Change and the approach the Inspector General of Police (IGP) is taking; using Scrum to incrementally make changes to the organisation. While Nana Abban and the IGP have been focusing on the big p...

The Ghana Police Service is in trouble. Over the last few last few decades, each new Police organisation and government has tried in various ways to carry out some change but most changes have been ad-hoc, temporary, not robust enough or strategic. The old problems return to haunt new administration...

Cuando se trata de literatura ágil, donde hace años no había prácticamente nada, ahora hay una abundancia que hace realmente difícil elegir.

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...

"It's weird when you get roles that coincide with your life" - Lily James Introduction Impressive-sounding job titles are a recurring joke in large organizations. They often bear little relationship to the devil's brew of chaos and drudgery which is a daily reality for most. Cynics may hol...

Una de las cuestiones que se plantean habitualmente en organizaciones, equipos y Agile Coaches, es el uso de un método que permita organizar el trabajo de forma ágil. El uso de un método como Scrum o Kanban va mucho más allá del proceso en sí, sino que suponen una herramienta para mejorar la capacid...

La velocidad es uno de los temas de Scrum más discutidos online y offline. Sólo hace falta acercarse a la comunidad de Scrum Masters en Facebook para comprobar como muchas de las cuestiones planteadas están en la linea de la velocidad de entrega de los equipos de desarrollo de Software.

El Sprint Backlog suele generar bastantes dudas en cuanto a su gestión. En ocasiones se convierte en un arma arromadiza que los stakeholders, el Producto Owner o incluso el Scrum Master utilizan para controlar el equipo. ¿Es esta su función?

The webinar covers the following: - How to improve your Sprint forecasting using common Kanban metrics. - How to improve your Kanban team’s kaizen with Scrum’s events, roles and artifacts. - How combining the Kanban practices with the Scrum Framework will enhance the collaboration across your tea...

Comme dit le dicton ce n'est pas la destination, mais la route qui compte. On pourrait dire la même chose pour DevOps et de son implantation dans une organisation. Oui, le résultat est magique puisqu'il vise à nous faire livrer quotidiennement de la valeur d'affaires, mais le périple l'est d'autant ...

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...

In this blog post I'll share my view on the question "What is a Scrum Master actually doing during the day?" I will use different sources and perspectives to answer this question and clarify the title and describe a day in the life of a Scrum Master.

Several of us in the Kanban and Scrum community got together recently to build a bridge between Scrum and Kanban. We are writing a series of blog posts looking at this bridge from different perspectives. In this post, we present a primer on the Scrum Framework from a Kanban perspective.

Pour avoir un aperçu de la perception et compréhension des personnes de quelque chose, il suffit de regarder les réseaux sociaux.

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...

Find the books written and co-authored by Ken Schwaber, our Professional Scrum Trainers and staff to help you learn more about Scrum and Agile.

Several of us in the Kanban and Scrum community got together recently to build a bridge between Scrum and Kanban. We are writing a series of blog posts looking at this bridge from different perspectives.

Does this headline make you cringe or cheer? Scrum.org’s Steve Porter and ActionableAgile’s Daniel Vacanti weigh in on whether we should blend these two approaches.

"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...

Your team has been trained and coached to deliver new chunks of software in a short time frame. Those using Scrum will be able to deliver in a Sprint. Those using Kanban will deliver as soon as their small feature is done. You’ve learned alternative ways of estimating which don’t include time as a m...

At Amsterdam Airport Schiphol we're using an Agile approach to realize a large digital program. This program includes 5 value streams with multiple teams. Due to the increasing scale of the program, some challenges arise. For example: How to organise a Sprint Review with an increasing amount of t...

​ Table Manners There is a striking similarity between good table manners and good agile behaviours - "agile table manners". It is even more clear when viewed through the lens of the Scrum values: Focus, Respect, Openness, Courage and Commitment. The intent of manners is to help it be as safe ...

I see four common reasons an agile implementation doesn't get the benefits hoped for. These reasons include a failure to limit risk, long end-to-end delivery lead times, consistent cost-overruns, and no one knows why you do what you do. Are you in this situation? Read on to see if these match up to ...

An overview of documents and books to help understand the role of the Product Owner organized by assessment categories.

Today I changed my Twitter and LinkedIn profile. I removed Agile Coach and replaced it with Scrum Master. 100% Scrum Master. Although it seems a small change, it raised quite some concern when I suggested the idea a couple of weeks ago... "You should stick with Agile Coach. As a freelancer, th...

As Agility in Mind launch our new training course designed to help distributed teams work effectively, we share our experiences on the reality of remote working, offshore development and virtual teams. Real life is about compromise Designing an effective IT product delivery capability is a ...

Working with a range of people, it is interesting to observe how many are aiming to “Do Scrum” or “Get Agile”. The issue with this thinking is that people are focusing on the transport, not the destination.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail! Huh? I don’t know; it’s something my father always said. I think he meant that if you don’t have the right tool for the job, you’ll use the tool you have. And if it’s the wrong tool, the job will suffer. Agile frameworks are too...