“I’m not here to experiment. I’m here to get production stacks out the door, and Agile helps us get there.” — Tim Burke, VP of Cloud and Operating System Infrastructure Engineering at Red Hat Yearly since 2013, Scrum’s certifying body, Scrum Alliance®, sponsors the State of Scrum, a survey of more than 2,000 of their member […]
Don’t Inflict Scrum or Kanban on Teams
(This article is part of the Beyond Scrum series) We’ve all experienced the pain of having someone impose a change on us – it doesn’t work. Forcing change conflicts with the essential human need for autonomy – No one likes being told what to do (if they didn’t ask to be). Whichever model for understanding […]
Creativity for Agile Teams
There are many ways to redefine a work environment to support greater creativity that have been discovered through experience, experimentation, and accident. At the same time, modern neuroscience suggests guidelines for deliberately designing conditions to enhance creativity, using our best understanding of how our brains work, learn, integrate, and create. How do we support, enable, […]
Test Driven Development is Not a Quality Assurance Technique
Effective testing should be done to ensure that a Product solves the business problem, in the way it was intended. It also seeks to prove that no change to the Product harms an existing working system. (It’s a much deeper topic than we can cover here.) These are the goals of Quality Assurance. So I […]
Is There a Best Day to Start and Finish a Sprint?
No, of course not. So when should your Team start and end Sprints? The usual rules of Scrum apply – ask the Team. Run an experiment. There is an instinctive tendency to want to wrap up things at the end of the work week so we can unplug our brains for the weekend, and start […]
Scrum Development Team – Who’s In It?
I’m frequently asked if a Tester, Business Analyst, User Experience (UX) person, Database Analyst, or Security Expert is part of the Scrum team? Short answer: Yes. Long answer: many people misunderstand the Scrum Guide. Scrum Development Team Membership The Scrum Guide has a short section called “The Development Team” which says: The Development Team consists […]
What United Can Teach Us About Building Systems
![By InSapphoWeTrust from Los Angeles, California, USA (United Airlines - N797UA Uploaded by Altair78) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://agilepainrelief.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/800px-United_Airlines_777_N797UA-150x150.jpg)
In April 2017, United Airlines made global headlines when they forcibly removed one passenger (David Dao) who had already boarded the flight, to accommodate crew flying to another destination. The flight staff called the airport police and Dao was hurt as he was dragged off the plane, suffering a concussion, loss of teeth and other […]
Beyond Scrum Blog Series
We’ve had requests for a single page that lists all the ongoing Beyond Scrum blog posts in one handy spot, and we’re happy to oblige! The below list will be updated as new posts are added. Scrum Alone is Not Enough Simplicity Scrum Development Team – Who’s In It? What is the Recommended Scrum Team […]