Yeah let's do Scrum.

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Suggested reading for anyone who is taking the Professional Scrum Master certification assessment or just looking to learn more about being a Scrum Master.

I remember going on a PRINCE2 course a few years ago, and trying to determine how this celebrated stage-gated framework might be applied to an agile mode of delivery. I was employed in the UK public sector at the time, and I had come to know how instrumental "PRINCE2 compliance" can be to the striki...

Delivering products is complex work and for more than 20 years, people have been using Scrum to do so. Scrum is a framework in which you add practices that make sense for your Scrum Team or organization to build and define your overall process. Kanban can be used to enhance that overall process and...

Delivering products is complex work and for more than 20 years, people have been using Scrum to do so, and leaders are increasingly focused on how they can help their organizations become more agile. Here are some resources for learning more about Professional Agile Leadership and preparing for the...

It's true, everyone should use Scrum.

Something interesting about Scrum.

Lookin' good so far!!

Test

Testing publishing.

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Have you ever wondered what managers do in Scrum? Or maybe you have heard about Management 3.0 and wondered how it can help Agile Leaders. Interested in becoming a next generation Agile Leader who inspires Agile Teams to master the complexity of Software Delivery? If you answered yes to any of these...

“I added a Refactoring Story for the next Cleanup Sprint” This is an interesting statement. Let's see how often the alarm bell rang in your head. I mean how many smells you can find in that statement... Before you scroll down to read my answers, please count to 10 and try to find 3 issues. [cap...

"Not a tester, so what are you then?" you might ask. Being that offending is generally not helpful. Unless you try to catch the attention as I do in this blog post ;-) Let's digest the situation in detail. A friend of mine attended my Scrum Developer class and caught fire during the "Testing" mo...

Ok... Let's make this a short one. I talked to lots of people about this statement and after lots of strange looks I got lots of comments about the behaviour. Especially about the "since it's crap". This is pretty obvious a very strong opinion about something. But hey! Maybe the code works, passed...

Let me quickly describe a potential situation how this came about. During the Sprint Planning, the team had agreed to deliver the top 5 Backlog items. They had some conversations about what the items are and where the problems could lie within those. The Product Owner had the feeling that just the ...

I talk to a lot of people (if the day is long enough) and so I get them to ask interesting questions like: "What have you learned recently?" or "What is your top 1 goal for 2020?" These questions and more leads us to interesting conversations about personal development and personal goals that a pers...

“Shirley, anything worth having is worth working hard for.”, that was how my friend Steve Porter from Scrum.org put it as I pursued my journey with Scrum. MY JOURNEY WITH SCRUM My journey started a few years ago when a friend asked me to provide Scrum training to their organization. I had substantia...

This is a very common myth, frequent on people used to develop software only within the context of a closed scope (traditional project). The Scrum framework is agnostic when it comes to set the context of software development; it just talks about “complex product development”. In general, agile soft...

Let’s start with a question. When is the Sprint Planning over? Usually, the first answer that comes to mind is “when the time-box expires”. It is a good answer. However, we Sprint Planning is a maximal time-box. We can end the Sprint Planning earlier, can’t we? Yes, when we are done with planning, w...

I was honored to participate in the Women in Agile panel discussion last week. If you missed it, you can watch the recording. I learned three things from this experience: 1) an hour goes by very fast, 2) I have a lot more to say on the topic, and 3) I want more opportunities to help women. We r...

A recurring Scrum myth I see in my training and coaching is that there is no planning in Scrum.  Unfortunately, this myth can lead to two negative consequences. The people in organizations responsible for budgets, product management, sales, and marketing may be unwilling to try Scrum. Scrum Teams...

This week I had the privilege to facilitate the Zombie Scrum workshop with Christiaan Verwijs. Together with Johannes Schartau, Christiaan created the Zombie Scrum workshop with the goal to call attention to the alarming condition of Scrum in many organisations. In the article "The Rise of Zombie Sc...

This post is part of a series on debunking Scrum Myths.  While my business cards say Professional Scrum Trainer, I may change that to Scrum Myth Buster.  This post debunks the myth that the Daily Scrum is a status meeting.  This myth undermines the effectiveness of Scrum in major ways.  I will share...

People always as ask me if agile is just for software. Saying agile is just about software is like saying software is just about science. Initially, computer science was about replacing manual processes. Now, it’s about creating human experiences. Building human experiences needs to extend beyond s...

The Scrum Team consists of 3 distinct Scrum roles that promote Self-organization: the Scrum Master, the Product Owner, and the Development Team. The accountability of each role complements the accountability of the other roles. Hence, collaboration between these roles is the key to success: The Sc...

When Scrum is introduced in a company, most of the time, the development team embraces it with lots of enthusiasm. Scrum embodies self-organizing, autonomous, multidisciplinary teams that acknowledges individual qualities and reinforces the strengths of the team as a whole. Who doesn't want to be pa...

THE (MIXED) BLESSING OF NEXTGEN REWRITES  About 10 years ago, I experienced the mixed blessing of being part of yet another nextgen rewrite project. I was guiding a team of about 25 really smart team members, part of a much larger team of about 150+ people. Our team was responsible for completely re...

One of the recurring Scrum Myth discussions I have with colleagues, teams new to Scrum and those attending training when comparing Scrum & DevOps relate to a misinterpretation of the following paragraph from the Scrum Guide. At the end of a Sprint, the new Increment must be “Done,” which means ...

One common consequence of teams that do not deeply understand Scrum and the nature of its events is that they believe it is possible to run sprints which do not produce a Done and releasable increment of the product. This belief typically leads to dangerous consequences so it’s important to caution ...

Clients and training attendees ask me "Can you use Scrum for something else than software?”. What they usually mean is building some other products or organizing team’s work. Let’s explore a more exotic idea. It’s beginning of a new year, the time when people make and try to achieve new year’s resol...

The Scrum framework thrives on empirical process control. The inspection of observable results gives us insights in what might be most valuable next, always acknowledging that the future is unwritten. The Scrum events function best when employed in such forward looking mode. Inspection is pointless ...

One of the arguments used against Scrum and a common misconception at the same time is the idea that quality is traded for speed in Scrum. As a PST with years of experience in Quality Assurance I decided to challenge this myth. I believe and I have seen many times that proper way of implementing Scr...

At Amsterdam Airport Schiphol we're using an Agile approach to realise a large digital program. This program includes 5 value streams with multiple teams. Due the increasing scale of the program some challenges arise. For example: How to organise a Sprint Review with an increasing amount of teams an...

IMAGINE Imagine you have just been asked to build an Agility Enablement Organization for your company. Sounds like fun, but there are some constraints you need to work within or around… There are 100+ teams with varying levels of interest in Agile You only have a small team of enablers You woul...

NEW YEAR RESOLUTION So it's a new year. New Year, new start, yadda yadda yadda... Maybe you are considering some New Year Resolutions so I wanted to invite you to take our 2017 waste-loss challenge by decreasing your Sabotagile Quotient. This challenge builds upon my previous blog - "Agile or Sabota...

In a previous post describing challenges to creating a Done Increment, I identified impediments as one of those challenges.  More specifically, NOT removing the impediments makes it difficult to create a Done Increment.  Scrum Teams will always face impediments because the work is complex and dynami...

In a previous post describing challenges to creating a done Increment, I identified too much change during the Sprint as one of those challenges.  The Manifesto for Agile Software Development talks about responding to change over following a plan.  It also says that the best architectures, requireme...

This year I was in the lucky circumstance to be part of some awesome (Scrum) teams. It certainly wasn't all "Scrum by the book" but I've learned a tremendous amount of lessons and generated lots of values insights. As always, some things turned out to be a success, other things failed miserably. Thi...

I would like to kick off a series of posts in this blog trying to debunk some common myths about Scrum. Many of them arise sometimes from a poor understanding of the Scrum Guide, and even more often, from not having read it at all. What is velocity? According to the Scrum.org glossary, Velocity is “...

In a previous post describing challenges to creating a done Increment, I identified a lack of clear Sprint Goals as one of those challenges. According to the Scrum Guide, the Sprint Goal is an objective to be met by the Sprint through the implementation of part of the Product Backlog. The Sprint Goa...

In a previous post describing challenges to creating a Done Increment, I identified a lack of team collaboration as one of those challenges. Collaboration is what enables the whole team to be greater than the sum of its parts.  Collaboration allows a team to work together to complete a product back...

In a previous post describing challenges to creating a Done Increment, I identified a lack of team ownership as one of those challenges. The Development Team is accountable as a whole to create a Done Increment by the end of the Sprint. When team members do not feel team ownership, individuals focus...

Recently I got asked what I consider the most common challenges with Agile projects. These are projects that have such a high rate of uncertainty and complexity on how and what to build, an Agile approach is necessary. Although my gut feeling immediately provided an answer, I gave myself some more t...

As a Product Owner and the CEO of Scrum.org, Dave West was invited to speak at ProductTank NYC earlier this year about the conflict between the roles Product Owner and Product Manager.

​Table Manners There is a striking similarity between good table manners and good agile behaviours - "agile table manners". It is even more clear when viewed through the lens of the Scrum values: Focus, Respect, Openness, Courage and Commitment. The intent of manners is to help it be as safe and pl...