What does it take to be a great ScrumMaster? When I was in my early years as a Scrum Trainer, circa 2011, it was noticeable to me that while there was a plethora of content out there explaining the role of the ScrumMaster and what qualities you want in a person for the role, there […]
Notes from a Tool User
Scrum by Example – Feeling Pain from Your Daily Scrum?
Dramatis Personae Steve – a ScrumMaster and the hero of our story Michael – another ScrumMaster for a different team Doug – a member of Steve’s team James – a member of Steve’s team Fred – a member of Steve’s team Paula – the Product Owner of Steve’s team Steve and the team are starting […]
How to Cross-Skill and Grow T-shaped Team Members
As we discussed in “Specialists Are Overrated,” developing cross-skills and “T-Shaped” people in a team has many benefits – for the team/organization itself, the customer, and the individual. That’s all fine and good to say, but how do you figure out where to start? There are two major ways to discover opportunities for cross-skilling: Kanban/Scrum […]
Specialists Are Overrated
“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.” – Agile Manifesto “Watch the baton, not the runner.” – D. Reinertsen, 2007[1] Traditionally, notions of efficiency have been to minimize cost by utilizing experts (i.e. expensive people) only on the most difficult problems and having cheaper workers do […]
How to Get the C-Suite to Support Agile
“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 […]