The terms "iterative" and "incremental" are used so frequently and naturally in the context of agile that their meaning is no longer challenged.

This article is about how we improved on the Spotify inspired model in one tribe inside a Large Dutch Bank.

On November 22nd, 2019, I gave the closing keynote at Scrum Deutschland, a talk called ‘The Four Things You Do To Prevent Value Delivery.’ In this keynote, I discussed the trends I found during my research at multiple organizations. 

Choosing how you will walk through your day, having fun with your colleagues and clients, actively listen and participating in collaborations, and ensuring others also have a great day. I have written a short story a while ago about the basics of the Fish! Philosophy for being an outstanding team me...

If you are working as a Product Owner, there is—very likely—room for improvement. This list of some of the most common Product Owner anti-patterns might be a starting point.

This post is an excerpt from the book that we’re writing, the ‘Zombie Scrum Survival Guide’. It’s our way of delivering small increments and involving our stakeholders: you, the reader. So we’d love to hear your feedback, encouragements and wild ideas.

A while ago, I received an interesting scientific article from Gunther Verheyen titled “Getting Things Done: The Science Behind Stress-Free Productivity” (Heylighen & Vidal, 2007). The article discusses possible scientific explanations for the success of a personal productivity approach called “Gett...

One of the teams I worked with suggested dropping the Sprint Retrospective and the Sprint Review from the Sprint and only do them every other Sprint.  

How to use the Liberating Structure 'Mad Tea' with Scrum.

Sprint Planning is a core event, defining how your customers’ lives will improve with the next Product Increment. Learn more on how to improve its effectiveness by avoiding 20 common Sprint Planning anti-patterns.

Scrum, in its more general definition, is a simple framework to help us address complex challenges. Product development is the subset of complex problem domains where Scrum took root first...

I call myself a Scrum Caretaker. I aspire inspiring people using Scrum. I prefer sharing positive experiences and cases that demonstrate how amazing working with Scrum can be, what problems can be tackled and how, the level of excellence we can build into our products, how Scrum can engage people.

In this 3rd article, I build on the previous two articles and give an example of how to use the two Pattern Languages to develop your pattern sequence.

In a series of blog posts, I want to share how you can use Systems Thinking to resolve complex problems.

When Scrum Teams discuss too many problems during the Retrospective they may lose focus.

Welcome to the Agile Movers & Shakers interview series. Today’s guest is Ben Linders.

How to start an Agile transformation? What are the initial steps? In this article I explain how transformations could be planned using Scrum Patterns and systems thinking.

It’s that time again. The end of the year, where many of us take a step back to reflect on the year that will almost be over soon and create another new year resolution. Like many of you, I do the same. On my last year life retrospectives, I wrote about servant leadership.

While Diana Larsen continues her coaching, mentoring, and consulting practice in a limited way, she has shifted more toward involvement as a co-founder of the Agile Fluency Project, a startup...

Last week, about 30 members of the Hands-on Agile community in Berlin came together to identify opportunities for personal and professional growth for the coming year, using Liberating Structures’ Ecocycle Planning in the process, to further your Scrum Master career 2020.

Can anyone be a Product Owner (PO)? What’s the best position in the company to fill that role? With Scrum you have one and only one Product Owner for a given product...

Scrum Master anti-patterns: The reasons why Scrum Masters violate the spirit of the Scrum Guide are multi-faceted. They run from ill-suited personal traits and the pursuit of individual agendas to frustration with the team itself.

What event could better embody Scrum’s principle of empiricism than the Sprint Retrospective? I assume all peers agree that even the simplest retrospective—if only held regularly—is far more useful than having a fancy one once in a while, not to mention having none at all.

How to use "Visible Status" with the information radiator to help the call to action? How to use explicit indicators to make decisions?

Scrum requires a self-organized team to deliver "done" increments at the end of each Sprint. This peculiarity sometimes raises criticisms and questions when it is discussed in trainings or when coaching the clients: how can a team work without a leader? How are we going to do our job, if no one tell...

As Scrum Trainer I get to meet a lot of teams and hear of many different ways to do Scrum. Most are valid ways, yet some seem more aligned with the values of Scrum or the purpose of the specific Scrum Element.

The role of Scrum Master is often completely new for many organizations, and often misunderstood. So what are the responsibilities of the Scrum Master? And what is a Scrum Master supposed to do the whole day?

Hello awesome people. Just a few weeks ago somebody from the internet sent me an email saying that his company already used Scrum but he felt that it is not more agile than when he used waterfall. 

In my experience, the Daily Scrum is the Scrum event with the highest anti-pattern density among all events. Learn more about the Daily Scrum anti-patterns that threaten to derail your transition.

Hi Duncan, I took your Scrum Training class a couple of months back. You mentioned if we had any questions, we could email you and I have an interesting situation I found myself in regarding QA’s in our Scrum teams.

During this Liberating Structures strategy for Scrum meetup we addressed dealing with uncertainty — a particularly useful skill in highly competitive markets. Learn more about how to train and grow the resilience of your team when dealing with the unexpected.

In this episode of Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer, PST Rich Visotcky answered questions from a live audience.

Your Sprint is over. Your increment is “Done”, you have coded cleanly, your unit tests and integration tests are bright green, you are proud of your work. The Sprint Review is running smoothly. The Sprint Retrospective allows the team to find 1 or 2 areas of improvement without revolutionizing the w...

I'd like to share another story with you... Thank you Paul and Charlie for sharing your story. It moved me and left me with huge smile on my face. 

A few weeks ago we considered the Agile Manifesto from a lean perspective. We saw that it is possible to map the 12 agile principles to the 7 canonical “Lean Wastes” in terms of a mitigation approach.

There are four key words in the first value of the Agile Manifesto: “Individuals and their interactions over processes and tools” Most of us can spend countless hours debating the value of focusing on people and the dangers related to focusing on processes and tools. Interestingly, in o...

As part of the Scrum.org webinar “Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer - Martin Hinshelwood - Answering Your Most Pressing Scrum Questions” I was asked a number of questions. Since not only was I on the spot and live, I thought that I should answer each question that was asked again here, as well as tho...

Sprint Goals are one of the more elusive parts of the Scrum Framework. Most teams know they are important, but few use them - for a variety of reasons. In this post, Barry Overeem and I bust the myth that Sprint Goals are optional in Scrum. And we make an effort to show what makes them so vital in t...

Last year, I ran a (non-representative) survey on how Scrum Masters are allocating their time when working with a single Scrum Team. Much to the surprise of many readers, the direct Scrum Master engagement with a single Scrum Team of average size and a typical 2-week Sprint turned out to be about 12...

At a recent training class one of the delegates spoke about their present company, about how it was the most “Agile” place he had ever worked.

Every year I like to deliberately go somewhere far from the crowd to take a break and reflect. You can say that it's similar to a retrospectives. Often times I may not realised whether as a Scrum Master my service to the organisation is already effective or not.

A customer I was working with asked me to help out with the intake process for recruiting a new Scrum Master and a new Product Owner. I asked them what they had so far. They provided a clear job description describing what they wanted to see from the candidates.

Software developers are mostly guys, happy to work by themselves at night in dark rooms. And they turn coffee, cola and pizza into code. Right? My experience so far To be honest, the longer I have worked in software development the more wrong this stereotype feels to me. True, when I learned t...

TL;DR: Scrum Master Duties, Serving a Single Team Scrum Master Duties: supposedly, a great Scrum Master serves only one Scrum Team—that’s at least a popular narrative in the Scrum community. Nevertheless, there is also a loud voice that doubts that approach: what would you do the whole day—with a...

The Liberating Structure "Wicked Questions" makes paradoxical realities transparent. By doing so, you can engage in deeper strategic thinking and explore new possibilities.

Unclear language leads to incomplete transparency and ambiguity. The careful use of words like ‘bug’ will improve decision-making in your organization.

An example of how to use Liberating Structures to improve the Sprint Review.

Icebreakers: are they a complete waste of time or do they add value? Some people absolutely love them, other absolute dislike them because they didn’t add any value. I believe a well-designed icebreaker can kickstart your session, can be fun and get people warmed-up for the rest of the session. Lear...

A meta-retrospective is an excellent exercise to foster collaboration within the extended team, create a shared understanding of the big picture, and immediately create valuable action-items.

Learn more on how to tackle impediments as a team by running experiments, iterating and visualizing on the solution.