Starting a team new to agility on their first sprint is one of my favorite and most rewarding things to do.  The enthusiasm,  newness,  sense of accomplishment,  teamwork, and the communication displayed in just the first sprint is usually enough to leave most folks happily surprised. “Wow, I never...

If I had a penny for every minute I sat in a meeting where teams argued about what was and was not “Agile” I would be a gazillionaire by now. Sometimes, the most vocal and dominant voices are the least aware of the fundamentals of Agile. To many, Agile is a buzz word and does not mean more than ...

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. Titled So You Want To Be A Hero : Soft skills at the core of Agile software development, the work is still attracting new readers.  The third ite...

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. By playing the game, his goal was to counter pessimism that was generally flowing within the team. As negative remarks about the proj...

In the book Scaling Up Excellence by Sutton & Rao, they discuss two different ways to think about scaling: the “catholic or buddhist” approaches.  I think this is a very interesting way to think about Scaling Scrum. The jist is: catholicism scales by having standardized practices and procedures...

Are you considered a leader in your organization? Do you spend your day at the top of the tower or in the trenches? Our best Agile leaders navigate an organization and fuel connections that lead to high performance across the workplace - here's how. In my travels, I am baffled by the number of l...

[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 m...

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 this bl...

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 eng...

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? We talk a lot about the characteristics of great Scrum Teams, but what does it *feel* like to be on a great Scrum Team? In my wor...

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 Professional Scrum Master course...

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? Consider adding an "apology" to your leadership toolkit. Once upon a time, there was a young and promising professional...

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...

In 2015, Scrum.org will refine the Professional Scrum Master (PSM) assessments, PSM I and PSM II, in line with following objectives: PSM I tests practice-level insights and knowledge of Scrum required for anyone entering a Scrum Team to know how to participate. PSM II tests the ability to apply t...

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. Do you travel for your job? Extensive travel is a must in my profess...

I am now publishing a second iteration of my upcoming book on soft skills for Agile teams. Titled So You Want To Be A Hero : Soft skills at the core of Agile software development, it contains 4 new soft skills (customer driven, patience, intellectual curiosity and selling skills). I've written a fir...

With the holiday season in full gear, many of us start crafting one or more New Year’s resolutions: A secular tradition … in which a person makes a promise to do an act of self-improvement…beginning on New Year’s Day. What are some of your resolutions? Spend less and save more? Get fit? Healthier...

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).   We raise our children and teach them to be "The Brave Tin Soldiers" that express only the “right” feelings, have li...

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 do nothing else then they do this.  And boy do they do it!  This ...

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...

In this webcast, David Dame shares strategies he has used for successfully implementing and integrating shared specialized resources (performance, UX), distributed teams, and balancing resourcing between new feature development and maintenance/escalation work.

I want to tell you about a simple but extremely effective tool that definitely can find its unique place in the toolbox of any Scrum Master, Agile Coach or Trainer. The tool I’m talking about is a set of postcards or photographs. But let’s start with a small backstory. During the last year I prov...

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. Empiricism is based on three pillars: transparency, inspection and adaptation...

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, ...

In post one and two in this series, we discovered how emotions and behaviours are contagious and can have a dramatic impact on a team. Let’s now explore some approaches that help encourage positive behaviour and help us manage when things get difficult. This post, number three in this series, cover...

There is a wonderful game from our childhood. I think many people have played it. The groups chooses one person who turns away and says: The sea is rough - one. The sea is rough - two. The sea is rough - three.(Children at this time depict the fermenting sea.) Sea figure, stop dancing in the blu...

Do you like drinking a cup (glass) of tea? Ever had a tea bag that was torn? Spreading tea leaves in your tasty drink? Then you know that such leaves circulate wildly and chaotically throughout your tea when you stir it, add water, or drink it. Science is somewhat more precise about the behavior of...

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. Understanding mirror neurons is a critical aspect of  team development as when someone else experiences an emotion, m...

There is a question that is asked many times during our Introduction to Agile course, usually about half way through when the potential of these techniques has become clear but the practicalities of applying them have begun to raise doubts. The same question is asked by people who award contracts ...

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 your k...

“A Scrum Master’s practical toolbox” offers options, options from which Scrum Masters can select, and increase their understanding of their role as well as how the role was designed (Gunther Verheyen Directing the Professional Scrum Series, Scrum.org). It so happened that I carefully filled out the...

A fascinating recent study has shown that a single, toxic team member can create group team wide dysfunction and breakdown. We have all worked in teams where there is one “difficult” person.  They seem to take up a disproportionate amount of the teams time and energy. Conversations with them feel “...

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 a...

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 in ...

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”. After a few months of working on ideas, aggregating notes and wondering what hasn’t been talked about in Agile, I’m publishing the first ...

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. Each had its own structure, culture, goals and strategies...

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 Satir. The concepts and ideas of Virginia are used far beyond the field of family therapy. Scrum is a lightweight and flexible framework,...

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. Paleontologists found them in caves around the world. They depict animals, hunt...

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 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. They have other meetings, which you are not invited to. They might not visualize their work like ...

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. Perhaps you have lived through one of these situations: a long project that is behind schedule, over budget, and over-stresse...

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. In his the landmark HBR article Moon Shots for Manage...

Your plan. It will change anyway. Your detailed architecture. It should emerge. Your code. It will be refactored. Your document. It doesn’t compile anyway.

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 pro...

In 1995, the first codified version of Scrum was made public. In 2010, the co-creators of Scrum, Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, described the roles and rules of Scrum in the Scrum Guide. The Scrum Guide is globally recognized as the definite body of knowledge to Scrum. The value of the Scrum Gui...

At Scrum.org, we sometimes dare to talk about our what we do as “bringing humanity to work.” Sometimes I get reminded this idea is more than hyperbole or aggrandizing. This week I was a guest speaker at a small symposium on DevOps  in my hometown of Seattle. I spoke about Scrum.org’s take on DevOps,...

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 Items for the...

Dan Sloan introduces the pillar of transparency in Scrum and will navigate you through a journey of successes and challenges he’s encountered in his years of coaching and training Scrum teams around the globe.

I am a Scrum Trainer with Scrum.org.  I work with lots of organizations to help them become more agile.  I see a lot of bad Scrum.  More than my fair share.  Sometimes I see so much bad Scrum that it makes me question why I do this.  This post is my attempt to remind myself why. What is bad Scrum? ...

Today we are pleased to announce the release of ScrumGuides.org, a branding-free website providing the single authoritative definition of Scrum. For the last several years, Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, the original creators of Scrum, have worked together to maintain the rules of Scrum in the Sc...