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Alistair Cockburn has been sharing this distillation of Scrum in a recent talk called “Returning to the Heart of Agile”.  I really like the simplicity of this description since it recalls that Scrum is a simple framework. Deliver (or demo) each Sprint, with a...

Pivot is one of those words that some Agile people like to throw around to sound hip and cool, but often use incorrectly.  I have observed in many conversations where people use the word “pivot”, they tend to mean any type of course correction in product strategy...

At Agile Portugal, I heard Emily Bache (@emilybache) give an inspiring keynote address on the importance of coding dojos to advance the art of programmers and testers.  Emily, much like myself, is a strong proponent of test-driven development (TDD), but recognizes that while TDD...

No…as long as the Team meets ALL of the following three preconditions listed below, a full-time ScrumMaster is most likely unnecessary. The Team is learning from their mistakes and refining their performance as they go. The Team is learning and adapting to the...

I live in the City of San Diego and we have an estimated 1.4 million people living within the city limits.  Could you ever imagine someone asking the Mayor, or the City Council, “Do we really need so many fulltime fire fighters?”  Yet, a variation of this topic comes...

“Scrum has been a big disappointment; a failed experiment that hasn’t delivered anywhere near the positive impact that management was hoping for.” Not the most uplifting quote, but Geoff Watts (@geoffcwatts) starts his book, Scrum Mastery: From Good to Great...

“The only ‘thing’ capable of dealing with complexity is human beings” This is the central thesis of Niels Pflaeging’s book, Organize For Complexity: How to Get Life Back into Work to Build the High-Performance Organization, and speaks to the...

“Scrum will highlight every deficiency and impediment that the enterprise has so the enterprise can fix them and change into [the best product development] organization [in its market].”  Ken Schwaber As teams and businesses adopt Scrum and Agile to their enterprise, they will...

Quick quiz for all you Scrum experts out there.  Which of these common scenarios for Scrum Team are blockers and which would be classified as impediments? The build is broken. The process to interview and onboard a new Team member takes at least six weeks. Team members do not...

Ever wonder why some Agile practitioners regularly butt heads with more traditionally minded managers? Have you ever spent significant one-on-one time with a Product Owner (or a Team member or a Stakeholder) to answer all their questions about why and how Scrum works and they...