Within companies that use Scrum properly the organization is built around fixed, cross-functional, self-organizing teams who are given the freedom and responsibility to think of a strategy they believe will result in the best product. Everyone around the development team is focused on supporting and...

Comme on l'a vu durant la présentation, l'Agilité a des impacts à tous les niveaux et touche même les bases de données. Pour être capable de travailler efficacement dans un contexte Agile, le DBA doit ajuster sa manière de travailler autant en conception, que durant la réalisation ainsi qu'au moment...

PST Simon Reindl discusses how he has guided organizations through lasting change, what makes it complex and how to overcome the complexity.

At some occasions we stop to look back. We see the trail we left behind, the bigger picture, the impact we made. Small or big. We think of the impact we hoped to make, small or big. A humbling experience before making our way forward again. Early 2011, nearly five years ago, Scrum.org launched the ...

After almost a year, I am now publishing the 4th iteration of my upcoming book So You Want To Be A Hero : Soft skills at the core of Agile software development. In November 2014, I published my first iteration with only 10 pages. It got close to 150 downloads. As I only though my mom would download...

This is a list of 10 questions a Scrum Master may ask a Product Owner, in order to help coach them in their role. Of course, not all questions may apply based on your specific context. Not all Product Owners (PO) have the same definition of success, work in the same way, have identical Dev Teams, et...

A couple of months ago I wrote the blogpost "What is Agile?". Although the term “Agile” in the context of software development is quite well known, the definitions vary. Therefore I shared the most common descriptions of Agile, for example: Agile is a set of values and principles (Agile Manifesto)...

When developing a product, the given constraints and boundaries aren't always easy to handle. But as long as they are realistic and used wisely it shouldn't interfere in building a great product. The most common constraints are set on scope, budget, schedule or quality. In traditional plan driven p...

According to the Scrum guide, sprint retrospectives are "an opportunity for the Scrum Team to inspect itself and create a plan for improvements to be enacted during the next Sprint." In my early career as a Scrum Master, I used to follow this definition quite stricly. Time was taken to look for our...

Inspiring Lessons From the Life Journey of Mr. Warrick Dunn __________ As many of us in the USA prepare for the big college football rivalry weekend, let’s take a moment to learn about Agile leadership from Warrick Dunn, retired football star with a storied career in college and the National Footbal...

It is my favorite time of the year - Fall, the season of thanks, reflection and resolutions. As we approach the end of one year and the beginning of a new one, I look back with thanks and appreciation at all this year has given to us. Among other things, I am thankful for you being part of my journ...

Recently I read the book 'The People's Scrum' by Tobias Mayer. In this book he spends a chapter on describing the differences between project culture and team culture. To me, the given examples of both types of culture are highly recognizable and I can easily extend and complement the list of exampl...

PST Peter Gfader talks about organizations and teams and how to grow together as a team.

Where do you spend your days in the workplace? Are you living in the Scrum-oriented trenches of your organization, like the vast majority of us? If so, then I celebrate *you* -- as a real Scrum Team Member -- the person who does the actual work that delivers value for the business. Allow me the hum...

In my previous blog post 'The 9 Smells of an Organization' I described the difference between the terms commitment and forecast. This resulted in an intriguing discussion that triggered me to elaborate some more on this topic and share the highlights of this conversation. The Misuse of Commitment Co...

Are you considered an authoritative "leader" in your organization? Do you spend your day at the top of the tower or in the trenches? Real Agile leaders abandon the top of the tower and thoughtfully empower an organization from the trenches, which fuels the connections that lead to high-performing Ag...

A few months ago I first saw the brilliant speech 'The Smell of the Place' by Prof. Sumantra Ghoshal. It's about corporate environments and the faults of management in creating a positive work place. In organizations, it's all about the context. This has a huge impact on the behavior of employees. I...

A lot of people talk about scaling Agile. It’s all the rage nowadays. Everyone wants to scale Agile. But what does that actually mean? What does it imply? What are the underlying assumptions? Capital-A Agile When people refer to capital-A Agile, mostly they are referring to the value statements and ...

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 role of a Scrum Master is one of many stances and diversity. A great Scrum Master is aware of them and knows when and how to apply them, depending on situation and context. Everything with the purpose of helping people understand and apply the Scrum framework better. In a series of blog posts I...

The subject of this blog post might seem unusual. But having worked with multiple development teams, I've gained some experience with team members having (symptoms) of Asperger's. I mostly contributed to the team as a Scrum Master or Agile Coach. The combination of Scrum and Asperger's hereby always...

Before I begin, I have to make sure you’re not fixed on a misconception. The Daily Scrum is not a status meeting, nor a report back to the team. It’s a planning event. You can read some more here: [What is The Daily Scrum for?] Years back, in the beginning of my adventures with Scrum, I worked   wi...

An agile development team is cross-functional, meaning that as a collective the team has the capability of building a potentially releasable increment (the working software). Given that testing is focused on verifying the behaviour against expectations, and that the whole team is collectively respon...

For the past 6 months, Scrum.org has introduced the Nexus Framework to thousands of people globally.   At a recent talk, someone asked: So, when do you use Nexus?  When is it applicable?  How do we start? Great questions.  If you are: Building one product or one product family, Using multiple...

WYGAT WEED WHACKER The story of the Wygat Weed Whacker goes back many years – to the time we bought our first home in the beautiful town of Allen, TX. One of the best parts of our home was a small back-yard, where my wife would spend time after each work-day, hanging out with her plants to let go of...

Southern Fried Agile is the premier Agile event in Charlotte NC. It is a one day, content delivering, network creating conference with a focus on community and people talking. And I was lucky enough to be asked to present the keynote the last two years. This has given me the opportunity to see ...

A lack of defined engineering practices, standards and tooling is an often observed problem in software development, regardless of whether Scrum is used. It reflects the appalling lack of attention to technical excellence in our software development industry. In a context of Scrum, it is even more e...

Many years ago I was told to be successful you have to have a personnel mission, a clear, short statement that says what you are all about. And mine is ‘to help people deliver software just a little bit better’. Actually this mission has changed from its inception with the addition of the words ‘jus...

Just like how the Development Team role and Scrum Master role that can be easily misunderstood, the Product Owner is also easily misunderstood by organisation who are using Scrum. Over and over again I see people who are assigned as Product Owner are not really a Product Owner, either they do n...

This blog post is about a little box. A little transparent box. The box contained only one sticky note. A sticky note with a milestone. The milestone belonged to a a large project that concerned a comprehensive organizational change with multiple Scrum teams. This milestone was special, because it w...

Although the Daily Scrum seems to be a simple and straightforward event, I still encounter a lot of teams struggling with it. In this blog post I'll share my tips & tactics. You can use it as a checklist for you own Daily Scrum, and hopefully it helps you ensure the event to become (or stay) eff...

I notice how many people struggle when they try to improve their understanding of Scrum. I notice it in classes, on forums, at conferences, through mail. They look for detailed instructions. They ask universal questions that demand exact and precise answers. How long should Sprint Planning be? And t...

This webinar is a beginning to understanding the latest buzzword DevOps in the context of scrum.

Update: after receiving some valuable feedback, I've added the third lesson learned.  Previous week I used the Spotify Squad Health Check model to assess a teams situation and condition. One of the cards the game contained caused quite a lot of discussing during the retrospective and also gave me s...

Have you ever seen a Sprint Backlog that can be reused across Sprints? I have! A reusable Sprint Backlog contains obvious tasks, like for example ’write code’, ‘make test scripts’ , ‘execute test cases’, 'investigate' and so on. These tasks are too trivial to be useful and undermine one of the funda...

The concept of user stories is a well-known tool for describing requirements. In a simple format it captures the ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘why’ of a requirement. User stories have their roots in Extreme Programming (XP) and is an often used tactic within Scrum. In 2001, Ron Jeffries proposed the Three C’s ...

GREAT DALLAS ICE STORM OF 2013 I think it was the winter of 2013. I was at the Scrum.org headquarters in Boston, attending training on Evidence Based Management. On the last day of the training, as we were wrapping up, I got an automated call from American Airlines - my flight to Dallas had been ca...

This blog is the sequel to my earlier blog - Enterprise Agile Transformation Part 1 - The Story of BB Watt's Lawn Service. In Part 1, I told you the story of my friend Walt and how he got fired as the President of his HOA. WALT'S PENANCE After being fired, Walt was in the doldrums. I found myself...

The role of a Scrum Master is one of many stances and diversity. A great Scrum Master is aware of them and knows when and how to apply them, depending on situation and context. Everything with the purpose of helping people understand and apply the Scrum framework better. In a series of blog posts I...

WALT'S CHALLENGE  One of my friends - Walt, is the HOA President for a community of about 500 homes. Although it is a safe and beautiful community, they are undergoing a transition - many of the residents are empty-nesters who want to sell their homes, down-size and move to their retirement homes...

The Scrum Guide begins the description of the role of the Product Owner as follows: The Product Owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the product and the work of the Development Team. How does a Product Owner do this? Which instruments does Scrum offer to achieve this? How can a Product O...

There’s an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love... I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been. Similarly, an organization must focus the business around tomorrow’s customer, not today’s customer. The organization must continually learn from its customers to guide the busines...

In Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen’s book Great by Choice, a comparison is made between two expeditions to Antarctica in 1911. One of the expeditions mentioned is that of Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian who was first to step on the South Pole. The other is the tragic expedition of Robert Falcon Scott...

A pair of recent findings from the Standish Group confirm the astonishing success and cost savings of Agile approaches over waterfall. In the "Chaos Report 2015", Standish found that large Agile projects are 6X more successful than waterfall projects.  While Standish doesn't get specific on what is...

The role of a Scrum Master is one of many stances and diversity. A great Scrum Master is aware of them and knows when and how to apply them, depending on situation and context. Everything with the purpose of helping people understand and apply the Scrum framework better. In a series of blog posts I...

This is the final post in a three part series. Please like, share,and/or comment. Please click here for Part 1 and here for Part 2. Suppose you have a persistent group in your organization who has been completing its job the same way for a significant period of time. They refuse to change despite m...

Learning, responsibility and power - the three psychological models very useful in a Scrum Master's daily work.

This is the second post in a three part series. Please like, share and commentand I’ll be sure to update you when the next post in the series comes out. When implementing an agile transformation, do you start from the top or bottom of the organization? My experience has shown it is best to take a c...

The role of a Scrum Master is one of many stances and diversity. A great Scrum Master is aware of them and knows when and how to apply them, depending on situation and context. Everything with the purpose of helping people understand and apply the Scrum framework better. In a series of blog posts I...

Through my years of trial and error,  I have learned there is no one size fits all solution to transitioning organizations to agile...context is king! Every model is based on different organizational contexts. Each model’s context has its own starting and ending point. There’s no guarantee that you...