I would like to discuss Scrum and XP because I often get a question "When should I use Scrum or XP?" from people in the community.

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.

You’ve implemented Agile into your organization and hired professionals with Agile experience on their résumé to back it up. Yet, something is still not right. The gains that Agile promised don’t seem to be coming to fruition. Delivery times aren’t faster than they were before.

Simon Sinek in his book „Start With Why“ talks about the importance of knowing why we are doing things before we think about what and how to do it. I think it is a good idea for Scrum Teams also to start with why for their product development. An important point for Simon is „people don’t buy wha...

In this webinar, we provide an overview of Nexus, describe how it is being used around the world to help organizations scale their Agile efforts with Scrum. Our presenters then demonstrate how these real-world scenarios using Nexus can be applied within the VersionOne Lifecycle solution. 

Try organizing a party in a “Yes, but…” atmosphere. The result is probably a zillion obstacles identified, but no party.

In everything we do there should be some value - some importance in what we do. If not, then why do it? Without any worth, the thing that you're doing becomes a chore or you can easily drift on to something else. So we need to see the value in what we're doing. However, as a team we don't alwa...

"The most important metrics are: did we execute the way in which we said we would, and did we deliver the value to the business that we had promised?" - Jamie S. Miller In an earlier post we took a critical look at metrics and at how easily they can be abused. Pretty much anything can be meas...

I have recently been helping a new Scrum team get started with the framework and helping them to set themselves up with the best chance of being successful with Scrum. After a two week sprint in which they did deliver an increment and learned a lot about the product that they would be work on, it...

In this webinar, Patricia Kong, Scrum.org Product Owner of Enterprise Solutions and co-creator of Nexus provides an overview to the Nexus Framework, its principles and the thinking behind it. She will discuss how Nexus, like Scrum, promotes bottom-up intelligence to discover and emerge what works be...

In this post, we address the myth that the Sprint Review is primarily an opportunity to ‘demo’ the increment to stakeholders. Although a demo certainly can be part of a Sprint Review, it fails to capture what the Sprint Review is actually about...

Steve Porter joined Agile for Humans host Ryan Ripley to discuss a wide variety of deep Scrum topics and approaches.

“Agile” has become a buzzword in the software development industry as well as the wider business landscape. And for good reason – several organizations have cited Agile principles as the influence behind results such as better financial performance, project success, customer satisfaction and employe...

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...

Wenn man Scrum auf einen einzigen Begriff reduzieren müsste, welcher wäre das?

Back in the early days of Scrum, the Scrum Master role was exciting. The days of the pigs & chickens, the days when being a Scrum Master was considered dangerous. In those times there was the saying a dead Scrum Master is a useless Scrum Master  And even today I still use that when selecting a...

This document provides an overview of the changes made to the Nexus Guide over time.

“I designed a defined framework for using many Scrum Teams on a single product or problem. The result is Nexus, an exoskeleton that rests on top of many Scrum Teams. Nexus provides information and management information for guiding their working together.” - Ken Schwaber

In August 2015, Ken Schwaber and Scrum.org introduced the Nexus framework to the public via the Nexus Guide, the definitive guide to scaling Scrum. Today, on January 17, 2018, we release the first update to the Nexus Guide.

According to Forrester Research, 90% of Agile teams use Scrum.[1] One reason for this popularity is that Scrum is a simple framework that promotes transparency and empiricism. It is based on a set of principles and values, and consists of three roles (Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Development Tea...

An online version of The Definitive Guide to Nexus

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.   

In this article we’ll bust the myth that in Scrum too much time is spend in meetings. We’ll not only describe how time-consuming the Scrum events factually are, but also clarify the purpose and importance. After explaining the origins of this myth, we’ll offer some practical tips to prevent or resol...

With Scrum, World Servants Product Owners are able to identify which of their requests are higher priority and should be completed first. In turn, they also use Scrum to help them collectively agree on which backlog items should be assigned to the IT department in the next Scrum Sprint - a time-box ...

I often get this question when coaching or training organizations new to Scrum: “I’m a project manager. What do I do?” I’m happy when I get the question; it gives me the opportunity to talk it through. Too many times, people assume or jump to the conclusion that the role of project manager must b...

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.

Many Scrum Teams use User Stories as a technique for creating their Product Backlog Items (PBIs). But when the teams bring big stories to the Sprint, this causes lots of problems. The common recommendation is to slice stories so that the team can take 6-10 of them to the Sprint. Let's discuss in det...

In this post, we’ll explain the Liberating Structure "Troika Consulting" and how we apply this facilitation technique within our Scrum training and coaching engagements.

Flashback to 1995, Jeff and Ken had presented their paper at OOPSLA on Scrum. People recognizes it as one of the new ways of working. Fast forward to Feb 2001, no ski resort gathering and no Agile manifesto. People are trying different methods, frameworks and practices for improving the state of sof...

Yes, you read it right, it was really challenging for me, and may be other PSTs have the same or different experience. A couple of times I thought about quitting it but because of some or the other reasons I continued. This article is an attempt of sharing my journey, may be useful to you before you...

In this post, we'll bust the myth that Scrum requires work to be estimated in Story Points. Although it is a useful technique, and used by many Scrum Teams, it is by no means the only technique. Above all, remember the quote by Esther Derby: “Estimating is often helpful, estimates are often not.”

There is a frustrating misunderstanding of reality when one thinks that the Product Owner can reject a single story at the Sprint Review. This is the fallacy of the rejected backlog item and the misguided belief that this backlog item can just be left out of this delivery. That backlog item that was...

People in the Agile community must have heard or have came across this white paper multiple times. We have been preaching about it in our training classes but I am not sure how many of Agile community members have actually read it thoroughly. The paper was published in Jan 1986 issue of HBR and is v...

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods of InfoQ, spoke to Dave West, CEO and chief product owner at Scrum.org, about the state of Scrum in 2017 and the future of agile.

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.

How to Teach a Scrum Team to Split Stories Many Scrum Teams have difficulties with splitting user stories. Often I hear people saying: "It's absolutely impossible to split this product backlog item.” In order to solve this issue, I recommend organizing a workshop on story splitting for the ent...

In this post I will review what's a Proxy Product Owner, why you can find so often this role in organizations embracing Scrum, and some proposals to avoid this role and achieve a true Product Owner. What is a Proxy Product Owner? A Proxy Product Owner (Proxy PO) is a middleman role between the...

As a Product Owner, you are responsible for Product Backlog management, stakeholder management and forecasting. Therefore, you will probably use a variety of tools and techniques to track progress, manage expectations and keep people informed. One of the tools that may come in handy for you is a pro...

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...

Product Backlog Management As a Product Owner, you are responsible for Product Backlog Management, in order to maximize the value of the Product. The Product Backlog is the single source of truth which contains all the work to be done on the Product. As a Product Owner, you will have to make some c...

And after reading Jeff Gothelf’s and Josh Seiden’s book “Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously”, I realized that the world is full of complex problems. This got me thinking about the relationship between Scrum and modern organization...

In this Agile for Humans podcast, Dave West (@davidjwest) joined Ryan Ripley (@ryanripley) to discuss the latest updates to the Scrum Guide.

Today we bust the myth that it is the responsibility of the Scrum Master to resolve all problems that are hindering the Development Team.

The Scrum Framework The Scrum Framework is a lightweight framework that defines three Roles, three Artifacts and five Events, which is used to develop and maintain complex Products in complex environments. Scrum doesn't prescribe a lot of things you must do, the Scrum Framework doesn't include exte...

Appreciative Interviews (AI) is a Liberating Structure that helps identify enablers for success in less than one hour. By starting from what goes well - instead of what doesn’t. In this post we'll share examples of how we've applied this structures within our Scrum training and coaching engagements.

As a Product Owner, you are responsible for stakeholder management. It's important that you know your stakeholders, their interests, what they need from you and your Product and how they may be able to help you out as well!

Value comes in many different forms, value is context dependent and the definition of value in a certain context may change over time! What? Yes, that's right! What 'value' is, or what it means, is firstly context dependent.

The Product vision describes the purpose of a Product, the intention with which the Product is being created and what it aims to achieve for customers and users. The Product vision describes a future state of the Product and what problems it tries to resolve or what ambitions it tries to fulfill.

I have created a little exercise that I like to use to help focus the on things we can change, or at least situations to seek out or avoid, to help focus change efforts. The essence of it is summarized in a picture. I call this the agile affinity model, and the dimensions the key drivers of empiric...

In this post, we'll bust the myth that the Product Owner is a proxy for stakeholders. The bottom-line is that Scrum Teams become significantly less Agile when only the Product Owner communicates with stakeholders. Instead of framing the Product Owner as a proxy, we instead prefer to explain the Prod...