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Today, I read that new CEO of Yahoo!, Marissa Mayer, has decided to curtail the number of employees who work remotely beginning in June.  You can read the story here and some interesting commentary from NPR’s blog, All Tech Considered.  I excerpted  this part from the memo...

With almost every scrum class I offer, one or two students always seem to ask for Scrum case studies examples.  I have resisted their calls for case studies since to me a case study is mostly irrelevant to an individual’s learning more about Scrum.  IMO, the best way to...

I have been working with a colleague to develop a new course for ScrumMasters (and other Agile change agents) and we were talking about possible objectives for this course, who would attend and what is missing from our current offerings that this class could provide.  As we...

I recently came across an awesome and challenging book – Software for Your Head by Jim McCarthy.  There are so many interesting things about this book.  One of the key tools I discovered I can use right away while reading the book was an amazing tool to provide feedback...

Right before Agile 2011, I had the opportunity to co-train a CSM course with an awesome candidate to join the ranks of Certified Scrum Trainers, Karen Greaves.  One of the reasons why I was interested in training with Karen is that she has been applying many of the Training From...

User stories are tool that originated from Extreme Programming and have become the de facto way Agile teams document and collect their requirements.  There is a lot written on user stories (link, link, link), so I am just going to talk about what I consider important in writing...

One of the things I admired about Extreme Programming (XP) was the simplicity of the roles defined in the Green Book.  In XP, there are only two roles: Customer and Programmer.  When you are using XP, the Customer makes business decisions, Programmers make technical decisions and...

I do a lot of work with Scrum Teams and the ones that struggle the most are the ones where the Scrum roles are defined poorly and\or not filled properly.  Scrum is a balanced framework and when the roles get muddled, the framework begins to adopt the dysfunctions of the...

A Sprint Burndown chart is a simple tool used by the Team to provide a measurement on how close they are to meeting the Sprint Goal by the end of the Sprint.  Burndown charts are common in Scrum and are simply the trend of work remaining across time in a Sprint, a release, or a...

I was inspired by tweet I saw today from highligthing Peter Stevens post discussing the essence of Scrum.  Here is my description of Scrum without any of our jargon. “Scrum is a framework for Teams to get work done.  Every activity, ritual and artifact found in Scrum...