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The Scrum Guide says POs aren't required at Daily Scrum, but should they be? Explore why Product Owners should attend to increase team value.

Is IRCC's focus on speed creating unfair visa denials? Explore how mis-measurement clogs the system and hurts applicants.

Demystify GenAI with a hands-on simulation! See how it works mimicry, not magic

I tested AI code generation with the Tennis Kata. It outlined the basics, but the code was bloated, hard to read, and failed in a key case.

GenAI rolls dice, it doesn't think: a realistic look at what it can do and where it falls short.

GenAI and PredictiveAI promise greater efficiency, but speeding up workers often makes bottlenecks worse. Focus on these three things instead.

GenAI makes some work faster — but at what cost. We unpack how AI adoption can weaken personal autonomy, reduces motivation, and strains relationships

New research suggests AI coding tools may actually slow down experienced developers by 19%, despite developers perceiving they work 20% faster.

Looking beyond GenAI promises to understand real-world impact. Why faster coding might be creating bigger problems in the longer term.

Reading resources for Scrum developers to help effectiveness and efficiency.

To be a good Product Owner, continued learning is essential.

A good ScrumMaster knows that learning doesn’t begin and end with a workshop.

How having the client as Product Owner is a bit like playing Jenga with a blind fold. Entertaining to watch, painful to play.

As a Product Owner, saying yes is easy, but can lead to incoherent products. Use Stakeholder Akido to say no and protect your backlog.

GenAI’s role in the Feature Factory: Are you automating without understanding? What are the real-world implications for product teams?

Practical AI insights for ScrumMasters and Agile Coaches. See how it works and where it falls short. Avoid the hype.

Explore how organizational structure, decision-making, and metrics contribute to the complexity tax. Learn to start simplifying

Understand how simplifying processes leads to more resilient teams. Start to identify unnecessary complexity.

Explore if AI helps at the bottleneck, if you have safeguards for errors, and if it increases collaboration. Don't succumb to shiny tools!

A fragile organization that goes faster will be knocked over in the slightest wind.

In most organizations, work spends more time waiting to be worked on, than being worked on. To go faster? Look for the queues

Most work items spend more time waiting than actually being worked on

Bring work to teams, not people to projects. Measure value, not busyness

Grouping individuals together doesn’t make them a team.

Example mapping reduces feature creep, clarifies assumptions, and finds questions early

Applying for a job the traditional way has rarely worked well. It’s getting worse now

Onboarding over task work to help new people become team members

Teams are more effective they have goals. Finish 7 User Stories is not a meaningful Sprint goal

Scrum wasn't intended to be waterfall done in iterations

Daily Scrum is about improving communication, not status reporting

A tool to visualize options

Product Backlog Refinement - core to Scrum, yet so often we make it boring.

_Scrum team **Working Agreements** are a simple, powerful way of creating explicit

Good Scrum teams know that they own the Sprint Backlog. Great teams experiment.

Spotify never really used the famous model. Or don't create tribes

Team familiarity reduces defects by 19% and improves predictability by 40%.

Your a ScrumMaster? Isn't that Team Lead with a bad haircut?

Sprint Planning, Review and Retrospectivce. That is a seriously low bar for Collaboration

If your Scrum Team has been together for years and you’ve been following the Agile

People go into the office but still don't see their team, joining the same virtual meetings they would from home

Bonuses might get more features now, but at the cost of quality, collaboration, and a sustainable system

Majority votes is often the worst way to make a decision, in a team

Instead of focusing on being Agile, create a shared vision of what improvement actually looks like

From the Cambridge Dictionary, facilitation is “the act of helping other people to deal

Data and metrics are not synonymous. Velocity won't help your team improve

Boring, Repetitive Retrospectives, create disengagement and lead to inaction

Replace Show and Tell with Show and Play. Saving Boring Sprint Reviews one Step at a Time

Sprint Planning is the most underappreciated Agile event, leading to errors and misunderstandings

Models simplify reality, but can dangerously misrepresent what is really going

Mark and his wife, Doris, along with a small group of their friends, have become very good

Retrospectives are not Post Mortems. They're about your next tangible improvement

How big should my Scrum Team be? The science explained

Three tools work together: Stories invite dialogue, Acceptance Criteria define specifics, Done ensures global quality

How long should a Scrum Sprint be? A Scrum Sprint is a short period of time when the

Common mistakes teams and organizations make

The more the manager takes control, the more decisions they make, the longer wait times for everything

Building a real Product? Support issues are inevitable. What are some effective ways of handling them

Hardening Sprints are one of the most common Scrum Anti-Patterns. They harm quality

More Work In Progress leads to less work finished

_Frequently in workshops, I get asked, “Where shouldn’t we use Scrum?” The short answer is

It is common in the early stages of Scrum implementation for there to be misunderstandings

Mid-Sprint, the Product Owner has discovered unplanned work - what is the harm?

Traditional titles can be toxic at the team member level because they imply a limitation

Self-organizing teams require managers to support and develop, not direct and control

What does it take to be a **great** ScrumMaster? When I was in my early years as a Scrum

The team doesn't understand that Daily Scrum is for them, not a management reporting tool.

Learning happens best when people feel motivated, not coerced into skill development.

More specialist, just means more bottlenecks

Agile transformation succeeds through participation, not enforcement from top management

Forcing change conflicts with the essential human need for autonomy

There are many ways to redefine a work environment to support greater creativity that have

Effective testing should be done to ensure that a Product solves the business problem, in

No, of course not. So when should your Team start and end Sprints? The usual rules of

Is my specific role: QA/BA/UX/.. considered a Developer in Scrum

When things go wrong, look at the system that made it possible

We've had requests for a single page that lists all the ongoing [Beyond Scrum blog

Seeing an organizational change map with seven to eight proposed major changes can feel

Big-bang rewrites (even with AI) just create tomorrows legacy code base faster

As most Canadians can tell you, the rollout of the Canadian Government’s Phoenix payroll

the best measures still won't measure your biggest risks

Both Vision and Strategy should be created with input from the whole organization, not just leadership

Define vision for change with a mix senior management, middle management, and doers

If nothing changes, the control focus of the organization will destroy the Agile Improvement

Grow a culture where frequent small changes are the norm as the pace of change increases

Your organization has decided to become more “Agile.” Why? As we learned in a previous

In 201x, the global financial markets collapsed. Reason: mortgages were given to people

Companies are starting to fall into a trap, and it goes something like this, “Our

An example of an Organizational Improvement Teams can using Scrum

Using Scrum for Organizational Improvement, remember to include the people on the gorund

Scrum is a problem-finding tool, not a problem-solving tool. Without tackling impediments to shippable quality every Sprint, you're practicing Mechanical Scrum

Continuous collaboration matters more than following a pre-ordained flow

prioritize value delivery over keeping workers constantly busy

In construction, a lot of emphasis is placed on predictability­, getting the requirements

To be successful with Scrum in the long term you need more than the basic framework.

So begins the opening of the **High-Performance Teams Game**. My goal is to help you see

At its core, Agile is a set of [Values](external:https://agilemanifesto.org/) and

Back at the dawn of time Sprint Burndowns were considered a useful tool. Now they Anti-Patterns

How many teams can a ScrumMaster coach effectively at one time

In the long run overtime always leads to poor quality and morale

User Stories are a collaborative journey of understanding, not a static requirement document

Why Scrum recommends stable team membership

Discover why Scrum fails when it's just mechanics without spirit. Learn many of the common mistaks most teams make

Team members performed a play illustrating Story Splitting and INVEST

Story Mapping is a simple tool to help you visualize your Product Backlog

Technical debt should be tracked separately from user stories, not disguised as features for the Product Owner

In the past week, Yahoo has said that its employees must work in a Yahoo office by June.

Collaborating and using examples improves the quality and understanding of the Acceptance Criteria

Without clear acceptance criteria, the team couldn't agree on size or what to commit to.

I was shopping for a new pair of pants. My expected price was $75 for a decent pair of

“Focus on the customer. Build amazing quality stuff. Release frequently. Always improving.

Dan Mezick has written an intriguing book about creating an Agile Culture

The longer we go without receiving feedback the more likely it is that there will be a problem

Product Ownership is far more than requirements and User Stories

Nearly 6 months ago I saw another Top 20 list of Agile people. I was troubled. As a result

Large stories increase the risk that your team will deliver nothing at the end of the iteration.

Effective Estimation is less about how big the item is and more about a common understanding of the item

New Team members are disruptive, there can be learning and personal challenges. Good ScrumMasters coach both

Effective Teams learn to schedule learning time into their Sprints

Dealing with Technical Debt in Scrum, specificially Sprint Planning

Technical debt slows team velocity as code becomes harder to change safely

When all tasks of one kind flow through one team member, you will get a bottleneck

Good ScrumMsters, Make impediments visible without blame.

This question often comes up. Usually because a team has become bored with their

Games make a memorable way to learn, build a book with your team and practice Scrum

Interruptions are killing your team, what are you doing about it?

There isn't a Scrum Canon. There are no best practices. Experiment and Learn

There is just one problem, the whole concept of thought leaders is alien to Agile

If there is a line up, cashiers just start opening lanes until the bottleneck is cleared.

For the sake of simplicity, I’m ignoring anything beyond release planning (e.g. strategic,

There is no required format for DailyScrum.

A few elements of the

This statement is a great start, but it doesn’t explain why or give you much guidance

Metrics have best before dates. Eventually you will stop getting real value from them. Throw them away

On any project it will take from 2-4 months for the team to integrate a new person

The underlying point is that Agile/Scrum teams use relative estimation (e.g. is this

How we learn and hint it's not called learning styles

[A Personal Retrospective on the Agile 2009

- I found only one bad session. - I saw a lot of old friends and made some new ones (Kari,

Design reviews often fail when people due to a host of cognitive biases

Even if you haven't been laid off, I would start preparing now. You should start building

Authors need to respond to reviews and comments

Strong language like 'Rotten Apple' implies you're already convinced

- Does TDD really work? I've written about this before: [Advantages of

Games that demonstrate process improvement, early delivery, small batches, and cross-functional benefits

A few years ago [Bas Vodde](external:https://twitter.com/basvodde?lang=en) defined a simple test to

A few weeks ago I ran my first Coding Dojo/Randori and

We ran our first TDD Randori session at lunch

I keep on stumbling across posts about Agile 2008 and thought it might be worth sharing.

I already wrote about my top sessions for InfoQ so I will just link to them instead of

At Agile 2007, I attended Jean Tabaka's (author of [Collaboration

Effective coaching requires recognizing conflict levels, balancing skills/challenges

Let's start by looking back to where this idea stems from. As best I can tell objections

- Why do you need this boolean named retVal? Could it be eliminated the use of early

As it stands today the [Catalog](external:https://scrumcommunity.pbwiki.com/Scrum+Smells) contains

Recently I had a conversation with a long time friend that made me realize that in my

Collective Code Ownership isn't chaos, but team-based responsibility with shared standards

What Benefits does TDD provide? Is it worth the effort?

Don't estimate task hours It doesn't work

However in using a tool we miss the benefits of cards posted on a whiteboard/corkboard in

Code Reviews mostly find problems that good tools could spot. Pairing changes that

Meetings need simple ground rules and a clear agenda

Working at a distance is hard. There is a reason all the Agile methodologies recommend

**Basics:** The product backlog is a prioritized list of features of everything needed and

At the core of any successful development project is a team. The team can either work

Why Does Scrum work? Why do any of the Agile methodologies work? How does Scrum help teams

[![Influence- Science and Practice book

[![Influence- Science and Practice book