Fourth blog, in a blog series about the upcoming book: Creating Agile Organizations - A Systemic Approach, by Cesario Ramos & Ilia Pavlichenko.

In this blog post, Sander Dur explains technical debt vs undone work...

Das Sprint Planning ist ein zentrales Scrum-Ereignis, welches entscheidet, wie sich das Leben Ihrer Kunden mit dem nächsten Inkrement verbessern wird. Erfahren Sie mehr darüber, wie Sie Ihren Kunden durch die Vermeidung von 20 gängigen Sprint Planning Anti-Patterns helfen können.

The Scrum Guide doesn't provide a complete list of the skills required for any of the accountabilities on a Scrum Team. For example, it doesn't specify that Developers must use Java or C# code. The Scrum Guide simply states that Developers need all of the skills to deliver a Done increment of produc...

TL; DR: Scrum Master Anti-Patterns The Sprint Planning is a core event that defines how your customers’ lives will improve with the following Product Increment. Learn more on how to improve its effectiveness by avoiding 20 common Sprint Planning anti-patterns. 🇩🇪 Zur deutschsprachigen Versio...

The reasons Scrum Masters violate the spirit of the Scrum Guide are multi-faceted. Typical Scrum Master anti-patterns run from ill-suited personal traits to complacency to pursuing individual agendas to frustration with the team itself.

Scrum is a tactical framework to build products, provided you identify what is worth making in advance. But even after a successful product discovery phase, you may struggle to create the right thing in the right way if your Product Backlog is not up to the job—garbage in, garbage out.

Recently I was asked to answer some questions for a journalist on how to structure IT organizations. The questions were interesting and I wanted to share my responses here.

The Scrum Guide defines Sprint Goal as the single objective for the Sprint, is a commitment by the Developers, and is part of the Sprint Backlog. While many agree the importance of it, equally struggle in creating a good Sprint Goal. So let me share with you how I helped a Scrum Team write a good...

TL; DR: Scrum Master Success — My Top-Nine Indicators How would you know that your Scrum Master is competent? What are indicators for Scrum Master success? Is the regular use of the Confluence retrospective template one of the desired signals? Or is the quest to understand contributing factors fu...

With the rapid increase in the adoption of Scrum and other Agile frameworks over the past several years, I’m not surprised that a few misconceptions and myths about Scrum have surfaced.  While many more organizations embrace Scrum, many individual practitioners have not undertaken formal training.  ...

Misconceptions about Refinement—the process of adding detail, order and size to individual Product Backlog items can be highly detrimental to a team's ability to deliver value to the business frequently. In this article, we will discuss some of the most common myths about Refinement in Scrum.

The Scrum framework comes with its own guardrails and values, but it is worth taking a moment to consider the base upon which Scrum is founded by examining the principles and values of the Agile Manifesto.  The Agile Manifesto includes four values and 12 principles that describe a better way to appr...

The 2020 Scrum Guide includes five values that are important to every successful implementation of Scrum.  These values are courage, commitment, focus, openness and respect. These values don’t get much attention, but the longer I practice Scrum and coach teams, the more important I find them.  This ...

TL; DR: Scrum 2022 — Getting You Started as Scrum Master or Product Owner Probably, you are considering how to further your Scrum Master career or Product Owner career in 2022. Maybe, I can support you in that regard with a set of articles, documents, and LinkedIn polls I authored that proved ...

Surprising insights from scientific studies into when and why code smells are introduced, and practical recommendations for how to write better code

​​​​​​​As a Professional Scrum Trainer, I love working from home, but engaging with others in a remote environment can be challenging. If you’re using Scrum remotely and need stakeholder feedback to order your Product Backlog, here are a few ideas for how to gather it virtually.

​​​​​​​The Sprint Review meeting is one of the Product Owner’s most important events.  But even the most important events can become a little stale over time.  Here are five ideas to spice up your Sprint Review meeting. 

Being a Scrum Master can be tough. You are accountable for helping organisations change the way they approach complex work. If you upset enough of the wrong people you may end up “changing” yourself out of a job.

TL; DR: My Top Ten Worst Scrum Anti-Patterns I recently was invited to a Scrum.org Webinar, and I picked a topic close to my heart: the worst Scrum anti-patterns.

TL; DR: The Obsession with Commitment Matching Velocity Despite decades-long efforts of the whole agile community—books, blogs, conferences, webinars, videos, meetups; you name it—we are still confronted in many supposedly agile organizations with output-metric driven reporting systems. At the he...

What drives you to achieve? Money? Promotion? Skill mastery? Whatever it is that motivates you, that’s okay — be thankful that you are motivated to move forwards. Without motivation in any form, you can personally and professionally stagnate to a point where you become a detractor in a team environm...

If you are looking to fill a position for a Scrum Master (or agile coach) in your organization, you may find the following 54 interview questions useful to identify the right candidate.

On June the 8th Scrum.org hosted a webinar on the subject of using Scrum in Biotech research. The blog addresses unanswered questions from the session

When I first started practicing Scrum, I thought that delivering a done, usable increment each Sprint was the least important part of the framework (spoiler alert: delivering a done, usable increment at least once per Sprint is critically important for reducing risk, enabling faster delivery of busi...

Discover how EBM solves many challenges for Product Owners.

Scrum Master Interview: Demand Creates Supply and the Job Market for Agile Practitioners is No Exception

What has served me well over the years is a combination of observation and asking questions. Congratulations on your new Scrum Master position! Now what?

If you’ve ever wondered whether Scrum can work for hard deadlines, the answer is – yes!  Not only can Scrum work in these situations, but in my experience, using this agile framework increases the probability of meeting challenging  deadlines.

Technical Debt can be a difficult concept for people to understand, so lets try a metaphor. 

I was blessed with a partner who, on top of his skills as Agile coach, is a gifted graphic facilitator...

There are plenty of failure possibilities with Scrum. Given that Scrum is a framework with a reasonable yet short “manual,” this effect should not surprise anyone. While it is common to first look outside our team for impediments, such as dysfunctional processes or other systemic issues,

If you are looking to fill a position for a Product Owner in your organization, you may find the following 71 interview questions useful to identify the right candidate.

There are plenty of failure possibilities with Scrum. Given that Scrum is a framework with a reasonable yet short “manual,” this effect should not surprise anyone. One failure symptom of a botched agile transformation is the frustrated Scrum Master.

Contrary to popular belief, the Scrum Master success principles are tangible, when we guide the analysis with an outside perspective. Read on and discover four Scrum Master success principles: From when not to use Scrum to product quality to supporting the Product Owner to putting self-management...

In their book Agile Retrospectives, Esther Derby and Diana Larsen popularized the idea that a Sprint Retrospect comprises five stages. The second stage refers to gathering data so that the Scrum Team can have data-informed Retrospectives.

If you are looking to fill a position for a Product Owner in your organization, you may find the following 71 interview questions useful to identify the right candidate. They are derived from my fourteen years of practical experience with XP and Scrum, serving both as Product Owner and Scrum Master ...

There are plenty of failure possibilities with Scrum. Given that Scrum is a framework with a reasonable yet short “manual,” this effect should not surprise anyone.

Some time ago, someone on Reddit asked whether there would be any other profession that requires attending a 2-day training class and would then pay as well as a Scrum Master job.

A few weeks ago, Scrum.org hosted a webinar on Product Backlog anti-patterns, which left several questions unanswered as we ran out of time. In this blog post, Stefan Wolpers answers those questions.

Peer Recruiting is the new hiring: Shortly, all creative, technology-based organizations will need to abandon the command & control structures that served the industrial world of the 20th century so well. Instead, they will reorganize themselves around autonomous teams to deal with the complexity an...

TL; DR: How to Make Agile Work in Fast-Growing Startups For years, I worked in several Berlin-based, fast-growing startups in my capacity as Scrum Master, agile coach, and Product Owner. These are my lessons learned on making ‘agile’ — including Scrum as a framework — work in a fast-growing start...

A simple model to better understand why and when something is valuable to your team and its stakeholders (in commercial organizations)

Gathering the metrics for Evidence-based Management in software organisations can be a strenuous task and I have a number of customers that are fretting on what to collect and from where. Here I try to create an understanding of the ‘what’ that we need to collect. Updated to reflect the 2020 Scru...

We are moving toward the "Agile" Transformation. One of our goals is to increase velocities across all our teams by X%. Have you heard this?

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.

There is a better way than staggered iterations for delivery that will keep you on the path to agility. Staggered iterations lead to more technical debt and lower quality software.

Many organisations wrestle with the seeming incompatibility between agile and release management, and they struggle with release planning and predictable delivery.

If you are looking to fill a position for a Product Owner in your organization, you may find the following 71 interview questions useful to identify the right candidate.

In the 2020 Version of the Scrum Guide, the commitments were introduced for each artifact. These then became an element of Scrum; in that they need to be used to gain the maximum value that the Scrum Framework offers. They were always part of a Professional Scrum approach, now there is a clear conne...