I was recently contacted by a senior executive of a mid-sized company that is evolving their product development to Scrum. He explained a situation he had been in and wanted my opinion. He accepted me to share his story here (with some abstractions, and calling him Jim) in an open-ended way, invitin...

Scrum brings agility to and creates Agile organizations through the implementation of empirical process control, the process of frequent inspection and adaptation. The empiricism of Scrum serves discovering and taking advantage of opportunities and options, at all levels; people, technology, market....

Making a purchase can feel great when you’ve developed a rapport with the salesperson. Regardless of the product; from a tasty treat at the farmer’s market to a major purchase like a new car; a sale is much more likely when the vendor not only cares deeply about their product but also takes time to ...

A program team of over 40 people decided to move to Agile from their traditional development practices. The program was old and had been in existence for over 6 years. In these 6 years they had released multiple versions of their software product to their customers. In the rush to satisfy the custom...

EMBARRASSING DISCOVERY True Story from when I was Agile Coach for a Multi-Billion Dollar, Fortune 15 Giant… It was a large Agile program and we had new team members joining the program in waves. Not everyone was familiar with Agile and we did not have money for in-person training. So we had ...

Dear Scrum Master! Being a Professional Scrum Trainer, agile coach & consultant for a while I had a chance to work with around a thousand Scrum Masters across different organizations. I see recurring patterns of misunderstanding and misapplication of Scrum usually visible in how Scrum Masters...

“Eventbrite Order Notification” – This is probably one of the best mails I receive as a ScrumTrainer It usually means I have another student with whom I can share my passion for Scrum. Sometimes it doesn’t quite work that way. Last year, I got this notification for a student who wanted to attend...

[Author’s note: I will be a Scrum Day Dallas on 27 March 2015; a great opportunity to meet me and other master Scrum Masters. Find me there and let’s talk about your Scrum Master journey. Exciting travels –Mark Noneman] So you’re a Scrum Master now. Maybe you’ve volunteered to fulfill the role or...

Watch a video version of this blog or scroll down to read a text version… I used to be passionate about Agile Coaching and Scrum. I have spent many years and a lot of money to get here. So it is strange that I am now writing about how all the investment made me a gambling addict. Writing t...

Setting up an enterprise-scale agile department with 200 developers working towards the same vision will ensure you are invited to speak at all of the most prestigious conferences, but is there a simpler solution? Just get Sam to do it The simplest way to build software is to find one talented...

Recently I just got an email from a QA manager who wishes to send his team members to Scrum.org Professional Scrum Master course: I’m so interested in Professional Scrum Master course. I’m working as a QA Manager on Scrum projects. Therefore, I intend to join the Prof...

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...

My name is Peter Götz. I am an experienced software engineer. I started in 2001 and have worked in several projects and with several teams since then. Besides actually developing software I have also prepared and conducted several technical trainings (Java, JBoss, OOAD) for developers. For more than...

Traditionally an individual is declared a ‘manager’ when having hierarchical control over other individuals. There are many sorts of power that come with it. A traditional manager assigns work, follows up on the execution of the work, is responsible for the results, judges and assesses the people...

Find out with a short test? A single instance of Scrum has one Scrum Team that works from one Product Backlog. The team sprints against the selected Product Backlog items and creates an increment of potentially shippable, or usable, functionality by the end of the Sprint If you want to test yo...

When I first started doing Scrum I was focused on project delivery. As a software professional I wanted to find better ways of delivering customer value and Scrum made total sense to me. But as I applied Scrum, I started to realise that Scrum isn't actually about delivery; it is about change. Now...

I am sitting in in a café in Singapore enjoying a well-deserved drink and dinner after teaching day 1 of the Scrum.org Professional Scrum Product Owner course. We have students from Indonesia, Singapore and Cambodia on the course. We have spent much of the first day chasing the idea of value...

Software is created by people; for better or for worse. That is very different from looking at software development as a robotizeable activity. The agile worldview builds on software development being a creative activity (not: industrial) undertaken by and for people (not: replaceable pieces of mach...

I work with a lot of companies to help them to improve their development processes and to either adopt Scrum or improve how they’re currently doing Scrum. Lately, I’ve noticed that a fair number of companies run into problems with a certain kind of project: The Rewrite Project. On this kind of p...

Recently I was involved in a discussion with Scrum.org trainers regarding the question “What is a failed Sprint?" I think we came to the same opinion and the same answer. And, in your opinion, what a failed Sprint is: If the team doesn’t complete all the forecasted Product Backlog ...

You need quality enablement to achieve predictable delivery for your organisation which takes effort to achieve. I do a lot of ALM Assessments for companies and almost every customer that I speak to has unpredictable quality in the software delivery that they receive from their teams. This is not...

As a Agile coach, I refer to a few tools to help me think about where my Scrum teams should go next on their path to Agility. One of these tools is the Agile subway map, a list of Agile practices grouped in different categories. It helps me think how a specific practice could help a team solve its a...

A few weeks ago I headed out to the Scrum.org offices in Boston to participate in training to hone my skills as an Evidence-based Management Consultant. I was talking to my father about it when I got back and was surprised that he recognised many of the practices and tools. In the 1990's my fat...

Collaboration is the key to successful agile product development. A community of practice is a technique that helps us achieve this. Inspired by the Agile Conference in Orlando in July I visited the Kennedy Space Center close to Cape Canaveral to marvel at good old Space Shuttle Atlantis. Watchin...

We shall talk about the most important, from my point of view, team’s trait - Helping Each Other. After discussion I will give you a powerful game that can help you to foster and promote real “one for all, all for one” team spirit.

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...

I have encountered many in the Agile community who love Scrum but seem to hate on the practice of Scrum of Scrums. Others describe their Scrum of Scrums as an overarching meeting of Scrum Masters, or as a meeting for a Product Owner team. In my experience, however, a Scrum of Scrums is a great wa...

Every year, organizations spend 4-10% of their revenues on their IT organizations. Value is expected in return for these expenditures. Here, value is defined as the financial benefit that an organization receives for expenditures. When measured, value can encompass an entire organization, or be c...

One of the most controversial updates to the 2011 Scrum Guide has been the removal of the term “commit” in favor of “forecast” in regards to the work selected for a Sprint. We used to say that the Development Team commits to which Product Backlog Items it will deliver by the end of the Sprint. Scrum...

In the past, the Scrum Guide consistently used the word "priority" for the Product Backlog or noted that the Product Backlog was “prioritized.” While the Product Backlog must be ordered, ordering by priority is only one many techniques — and rarely the best one at that.

Any Product Manager that has successfully delivered a product to a customer knows how incredibly important Release Planning is. Despite its importance, the 2011 Scrum Guide, published in July by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, removes any discussion about Release Planning and the related Release B...