I always spend time during training classes thoroughly covering the concept of Definition of Done, sometimes abbreviated “DoD.” As a concept it’s fairly easy t

Are you a Manager that believes in the power of Scrum? There is a difference between thinking, believing and knowing. Don't miss out on a huge opportunity to become the next market leader in your space.

File this one under: “how do you do Sprint Reviews when you have lots of teams?”  Indeed, the traditional presentation format gets long, boring, and ineffective when you have more than a handful of teams prese

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As people and organizations grow and mature their implementation of Scrum, they regularly check with us at Scrum.org about particular points of interest. Recently we have seen an increase in the need for help and inspiration in scaling Scrum and in ways to educate and assess Scrum practitioners.

This blog is part of my series on “Agile Trojan Horses – Covert Appetizers for Agile Discovery”.

The ability to create high-quality and attractive flip charts is one of the basic skills of any facilitator.

Young Jimmy is in 3rd grade.  He's constructed an immaculate paper-mâché volcano.  It took every spare minute of the last to weeks to make.  His mom carefully loads it in the back of the minivan.

Starting a team new to agility on their first sprint is one of my favorite and most rewarding things to do.

After only one month since the release of my second iteration, I am now publishing the third iteration of my upcoming book on soft skills for Agile teams.

A team that I work with decided one day to improve the general mood in the team. A member of the team (David) bought the Snakes & Ladders board game for the team.

In the book Scaling Up Excellence by Sutton & Rao, they discuss two different ways to think about scaling: the “catholic or buddhis

Are you considered a leader in your organization? Do you spend your day at the top of the tower or in the trenches?

[Author’s note: I will be a Scrum Day Dallas on 27 March 2015; a great opportunity

Watch a video version of this blog or scroll down to read a text version…

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?

Are you part of a Team in the workplace? Odds are the answer is "yes". Do you observe other Teams in your organization doing inspiring work and wonder how they do it?

As a leader, your own behavior has a profound effect on the effectiveness of Scrum in the workplace. Want to embody great leadership to elevate your organization's performance?

I was coaching a number of teams and their Sprint Reviews were boring status meetings and few stakeholders attended.

In 2015, Scrum.org will refine the Professional Scrum Master (PSM) assessments, PSM I and PSM II, in line with following objectives:

Is 2015 the year for you to expand into a leadership role? Are you focused on becoming a better leader this year? As you head back to the office, consider adding "Develop a sense of empathy" to your list of New Year's Resolutions.

I am now publishing a second iteration of my upcoming book on soft skills for Agile teams.

  With the holiday season in full gear, many of us start crafting one or more New Year’s resolutions:

He could have wept tin tears, but that would not have been right. He looked at her and she looked at him, but neither spoke a word (Hans Christian Andersen, The Brave Tin Soldier).

This is what you might know as the daily ‘stand up.’  It is the most abused, tortured and mistreated meeting in Scrum.  Or not even Scrum.  If nothing else, this is usually the part of Scrum that organizations adopt and keep.  If they

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.

One of the key foundations of helping your business become Agile is the use of empiricism. Empiricism is the scientific approach based on evidence, where any idea must be tested against observations, rather than intuition.

Traditionally an individual is declared a ‘manager’ when having hierarchical control over other individuals.

In post one and two in this series, we discovered how emotions and behaviours are contagious and can have a dramatic impact o

Do you like drinking a

You know how when you see someone smile, you smile too? Or when you see someone crying, you feel their sadness. Well that’s because of an incredible phenomenon called mirror neurons.

Find out with a short test?

“A Scrum Master’

A fascinating recent study has shown that a single, toxic team member can create group team wide dysfunction and breakdown.

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.

I’d like to offer to readers of this blog a first glimpse of my upcoming book “So You Want to Be A Hero – Soft skills at the core of Agile software development”.

Jeff Sutherland and I have helped hundreds of organizations scale their projects, enable their entire product development, and thread Scrum through their organizations. For sure, none of them were easy, and each had its own unique challenges.

I decided to conduct a Temperature Reading Sprint Retrospective after watching the video from one of the workshops of a famous American family therapist Virginia

People love stories. We love telling and listening to interesting stories. The need for this is embedded deeply by the nature. The first stories were told by our ancestors and can be seen in the preserved rock paintings.

Software is created by people; for better or for worse. That is very different from looking at software development as a robotizeable activity.

I have found that coaching managers is a different approach than with Scrum teams. While you are (most of the time) involved directly with the Scrum Team as a Scrum Master, managers are less accessible.

On more than one occasion over the years, I have encountered software development teams that are working day and night on a "challenged" project - both waterfall *and* Scrum.

There is a fundamental change in management happening under out feet that is challenging the very need for strategy. Small changes are happening every day and in ten years’ time we won’t recognise management as we have thought of it in the past.

Your plan. It will change anyway. Your detailed architecture. It should emerge. Your code. It will be refactored.