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...

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...

VersionOne does an annual "State of Agile Development" survey and publishes the results for the cost of your email address.  Thanks VersionOne!  I recently read through the 9th annual survey results for 2015, and there's lots of good, useful data there.  For now I want to highlight the top five reas...

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...

Scrum is a framework for complex systems development. Scaled Scrum is any instance of Scrum involving more than one team creating and sustaining a product or system. Scaled Professional Scrum is any instance of scaled Scrum that thrives on Scrum’s formal rules and roles, complemented by software ...

Professional Scrum Trainer Gunther Verheyen looks at how numerous organizations worldwide have adopted Scrum to become more agile. Many of them have engaged in endeavors to scale their product development done through Scrum. None of these efforts are easy, and each effort faces specific challenges.

If you have seen the TV documentary series Hoarders which depicted the real-life struggles of people who suffer from compulsive hoarding. Some victims suffered so severely that they were often drowning within their own filth. The disorder is immediately obvious to family and friends. Similarly, or...

The Scrum Guide requires that the Product Owner ensure that "key stakeholders" attend the Scrum Sprint Review, but who are these "key stakeholders"? According to the Scrum Glossary, a stakeholder is "a person external to the Scrum Team with a specific interest in and knowledge of a product that is r...

The Scrum Master is an amazing and at the same time very challenging role. He needs to have different skills, and depending on the situation put on a teaching, training, facilitating or a coaching hat. Furthermore, each of those skills is very difficult to master. People may spend their entire pro...

Our topic is soccer, the 2013-2014 season’s Spanish Primary Division. Do you remember who finished the season first? Barcelona? Real Madrid? As of 2014, Barcelona is the second most valuable soccer team with its 22 wins in the Spanish Primary Division, 4 championships in the UEFA Champions League, ...

Is there a way to help organizations move from a Change Transformations mindset to a Continuous Change mind set? Traditionally, organizations implement large scale change events within their organization by spontaneously have an epiphany and transform every few years. The frequency of these tra...

The Standish Group's "Chaos Report 2015" was recently published.  Standish gathers data from projects done across a variety of industries.  They present the data in buckets of "successful, challenged, or failed" projects.   I'd like to highlight my two key learnings after reading the 2015 Chaos R...

In Jeff Haden's recent post entitled "The One Attitude Every Successful Person Has", I was struck at how aligned this attitude is with the Agile Mindset. What do you think? An Agile Mindset... essential for healthy Scrum...is not reserved for specific people - rather, this is the attitude that anyon...

Featuring Martin Hinshelwood The proliferation of scaling frameworks shows there are real challenges in scaling agility, and the solutions don’t seem to involve inventing yet more frameworks or formal processes. So then, why is it so hard to find success in agility at scale? Large scale agility c...

Father's Day offered an annual moment for me to reflect on the journey of a humble and influential man whose life was tragically cut short in 2002 - my Dad. Although it has been a number of years since his passing, he continues to shape my mindset in meaningful and profound ways. I hope all of our ...

Recently discussing design and programming with an external programmer, he explained me his approach of defensive programming. But before going in detail of his explanations, Wikipedia help us to define the defensive programming: Defensive programming is a form of defensive design intended to ensur...

The Scrum Master role can easily be misunderstood as it is harder to grasp by reading the theory hence people often compare the Scrum Master role to Project Manager or Technical Leader. Scrum has been around for more than 20 years but yet people still found it challenging to understand the role o...

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...

Companies have two avenues for growth: acquisition, or organic growth.  Regardless of how they are growing their increasing size increases the difficulty of the company successfully responding to change.  Retaining as much as possible of advantage of that small company’s ability to rapidly pivot ...

Scaled Professional Scrum is based on unit of development called a Nexus. The Nexus consists of up to 10 Scrum teams, the number depending on how well the code and design are structured, the domains understood, and the people organized. The Nexus consists of practices, roles, events, and artifacts t...

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....

I’ve been witness to the start of hundreds of teams and projects. There’s a point at which, during the launch of a new team even before the first Sprint, I can tell with fair certainty whether the team will be successful or not. I’ve been thinking about what the root causes of this are, and here’s m...

n this session, we examine some common and not- so-common metrics before introducing how we can use them as a guide for continuously measuring business goals, aligning them with software development efforts, and then deciding what to do next.

One of the challenge working as a Professional Scrum Trainer is reading what is in people's mind when they are silent. In a classroom setup, silence can mean many things and it depends on the local culture. In some culture, silence can be a form of respect to the person who is talking. Silence can...

HistoryIn 2012 in one of my Professional Scrum Master classes I met a true gentleman. Much older than the average IT specialist in Poland, jeans and button-up shirt, amazing manners, spotless language and a perfectly kept medium-length black beard with shining strings of white. The kind of a person ...

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 ...

An analogy I can think of is... I want my dart to hit the dart board, and not necessarily the bull's eye.... as it calls for a lot of details which apparently is missing during estimation. However, if my dart doesn’t hit anywhere on the dart board... it's almost like shooting in the dark; a very dis...