Effective Daily Standups
I recently saw this post from Matt Swanson about the effectiveness of the standard Scrum formula for daily stand-ups: http://mdswanson.com/blog/2013/05/29/the-30-second-standup.html Thanks for posting it Matt. It's absolutely right to challenge this and the principle of adapting processes so they are more effective for your team is definitely the spirit of agile. In terms of my own views about...
One Minute Scrum Master
One of the things I really like about Scrum is how beautifully simple it is. Actually, the challenge in implementing any agile method is in how it makes you think about how to do things differently, both in terms of doing things incrementally in very short iterations,...
24 Common Scrum Pitfalls Summarized
Scrum is the most popular agile method… if you count all of the teams doing “Scrum Butt”. Doing Scrum really well is much harder and much rarer. Here is a list of 24 common pitfalls or bad behaviours of Scrum teams: Excessive Preparation/Planning: Regular...
What is Scrum good for?
I have worked with a lot of people, teams and organizations over the last 8 years helping them to adopt Scrum and I have seen some interesting patterns about where Scrum works well and where it doesn’t work so well. I wanted to share my observations to see if...
Free Scrumasaurus T-shirts!
Hi all. Apologies in advance for this slight deviation from my normal topic, but I have done a deal with New Relic so that any All About Agile readers that sign up and deploy their free web site monitoring software will get a free Scrumasaurus t-shirt! Sorry...
Scrum Team in Waterfall Land! What to do?
The real question sent to me was:What are some tips for integrating our SCRUM model with non-Scrum groups who will not be adopting the process?One can go many places with this question, and there could be other questions within this questions.For now, let me answer...
Solving Symptoms
Recently, I attended two retrospectives. Different teams, different states, different facilitators. I’m usually on the other side, leading retrospectives. Both retrospectives followed the “make lists” pattern. One made two lists “What worked well”...
What is Scrum?
If anyone thinks Scrum is now known to everyone involved in software development or project management, think again. 'What is Scrum' is still one of the most searched terms on the web (in relation to agile development that is). According to the Scrum Alliance,...
The ScrumMaster Tales
I’ve been struck how little is written about being a great Scrum Master. There is heaps written about Scaling Agile and a lot of great Technical books, but very little on playing individual roles well. The ScrumMaster Tales are intend to fill this gap. Cast of...
Promoting Double Loop Learning in Retrospectives
“The thinking that got us here isn’t the thinking that’s going to get us where we need to be.” attributed to Albert Einstein I have this niggling concern about retrospectives. I have no doubt that retrospectives that are too short, don’t result in...
Lame Scrum Implementations
I was talking to a colleague about one problem, and then said, "but this is not our biggest problem -- our biggest problem is lame scrum implementations." So, I thought I would discuss that. First, truly, our biggest problem is not Scrum or anything to do with...
Guaranteed Success With Scrum
At this point in my coaching career, I’ve worked with lots of teams, in lots of companies, trying to adopt Scrum. I’ve seen teams do exceedingly well… and I’ve seen a few totally crash and burn. I want to share a few things I believe to be non-negotiable...
Lessons from the trenches (of Scrum)
I was talking to a great person at a firm that will not be named. He is in charge of a large implementation of agile for a large group within a much larger organization. They start their teams with agile (Scrum) training and a hands-on workshop. And also provide...
