Want your students or clients to really learn Agile? Then get them to teach Agile to themselves. Experience Agile is the activity I use to close my two-day Agile class. Students learn Agile by doing Agile and by teaching Agile to each other. The assignment: Design, implement, and deliver a product that teaches you everything [...]
Are your Sprint Planning meetings painful? Are your Sprint outcomes always as great as you want? Have you ever held a Sprint Retrospective and decided to get your Product Backlog truly Ready? Here’s an outline of a Product Backlog Refinement Workshop I use with teams I manage and coach: Goals The goals [...]
Hi there! I'm so glad you visited! This blog focuses on learning activities that work in physical space. Want 15+ amazingly fun learning activities that work online? Then take a look at this article, Your Remote Team Actually Can Be Awesome. Enjoy! I love using games and interactive activities when I share Scrum and [...]
Welcome back to the Scrum Master Skills Series! In part 1, I shared my notes on how to facilitate a great Sprint Planning session. Here, in part 2, I share my notes on ho to facilitate a great Daily Scrum. Enjoy! INTRO Facilitate: to make facile, to make easy. That’s your job as facilitator. [...]
Hi there! I'm so glad you visited! After you read this article, check out my courses, latest book, podcast, and other blog articles. Enjoy! Welcome to the Scrum Masters Skills Series! In part 1, I share my notes on how to facilitate a great Sprint Planning session. Enjoy! INTRO Facilitate: to make [...]
What is the manager’s role in an Agile team? In the typical Agile training class, we learn about Scrum’s three roles: Product Owner, Development Team member, and Scrum Master. Where do managers fit in? Should managers be afraid that their job title isn’t part of Scrum? What is a manager, anyway? In industrial management [...]
This is a transcript of the pecha kucha I shared at Give Thanks for Scrum 2013 in November. My slides are here. I’m Richard Kasperowski. I’m an independent Agile coach and Open Space facilitator. I wasn’t sure what to say today, so I followed the advice on page 11 of the Scrum Guide and held a retrospective. I used [...]
Who am I? I do great things with great people. I am a Business Transformation Coach, Agile Coach, and Open Space Facilitator. I help people, teams, and organizations understand what they have, discover and align around what they want, and transform from what they have to what they want. What is a coach? A coach [...]
Cancel your sprint. You'll be glad you did. I cancelled a sprint this week. We had begun building a new software increment, and we were on track to get it done. During the sprint, we discovered the limits of our approach, and shared what we learned with our customer. Our customer shared with their [...]
If my mom asked me, "What's Scrum?," what would I tell her? Here's my answer.Scrum is a way to take great ideas, turn them into a great product, and end up with happy people. Imagine a group of people doing something cool together, maybe inventing new tech product, or something else innovative that no one's [...]
Thanks to everyone who attended my session, "Radical Innovation: The Six Week Open Space Experiment," at Scrum Gathering Barcelona 2012 this week. My slides are here. My hope: each of you will hold Open Space when you return home. Will you share your experience with me?
If you could only read one book on Agile, which would it be? What about two books? Three or more? Here is the Official Agile Reading List, the full list of recommended reading to get you Agile: Manifesto for Agile Software Development. Start here. Everything else derives from this. The Scrum Guide by Ken Schwaber and [...]
Six weeks of Open Space—it’s a new world record! I facilitated a six-week-long Open Space with my software development team. As far as we know, this is a unique experience: we are the only people in the world to have held an Open Space for such a long time. We pushed the limits of Open Space [...]
My Product Owner is my business owner. He deserves all the credit when we succeed, and all the blame when we fail. He has the most important role in my Agile team. He should be the highest paid because he takes the greatest risk: if he fails, he’s fired. So says Mike Dwyer, and I agree. My PO [...]
Once upon a time, the team was having trouble getting things Done. We asked why, five times. We found a root cause: we struggle to get backlog items Done because we aren't Ready on sprint planning day. So we brainstormed a Definition of Ready. We use it as a checklist to ensure we understand each backlog item well [...]
Dear Future Product Owner, Congratulations on your new job. I want you to play a strong Product Owner role. I am excited about this. We haven’t had a strong Product Owner. The backlog is yours. You define it: you tell us what you want, and you understand what our customers want. You prioritize it: you [...]
A colleague writes: Is Information Overload Wasting 40% of Your Time? In general, multiple studies have indicated that >50% of people feel like they are experiencing "Information Overload”. At the more detailed level, Basex (a consulting firm that focuses on this area) derived the following from a survey intended to determine “How does a typical [...]
led two sessions at this year’s Mobile Camp Boston on February 19: one on mobile consumer identity, and the other on agile software development. Give them what they want: mobile consumer identity We talked about knowing your mobile customers. The most important question for you to ask your customers is, would [...]
We do a series of sprints to build our product, then we do 4-8 weeks of hardening sprints to really test our code and get the bugs out before we deploy it in production. Guess what? You’re not Agile, and you’re not doing Scrum. You are using the jargon, maybe because it’s fashionable, or [...]
What is the ideal sprint length? I've been thinking about this a couple of ways. First, what is your definition of Done? For my teams, Done means, concisely, it can be deployed in production, and people can use it world-wide. Then, think about your minimum batch size. How much work do you have to do [...]
Done is the crux of doing Agile well. You can do all the Agile activities--the iteration planning, the daily standup, the burndown--and still suck. But if you focus on getting things Done, two things happen. First, you start to actually get stuff done, and you can recognize your success. Second, when you don't get stuff done, [...]
At the Scrum Gathering in Orlando, we talked about company management as an impediment to the adoption of Agile and Scrum within organizations. Within the Scrum/Agile community, we are all believers and advocates. We network within our community. We publish data that support the adoption of Agile and Scrum, and we trust the data because [...]
Your dev team sucks. Use Agile software development for mobile, and be awesome. That was my pitch Saturday morning at MobileCampBoston3. I led a session later that day, titled "Agile for Mobile." I introduced Agile, explained some of its rationale, and identified some of the Agile frameworks. I talked a lot about Scrum and a little about XP. I [...]
I am now officially a Certified Scrum Practitioner. So what? So it signifies that my peers recognize that I understand Scrum pretty well. The certification shows I have actually applied Scrum for real, on a real project, in a real organization, for real stakeholders. It's not a big deal, really. It's just a token from an independent [...]
Anyone can write code, but how do you effectively lead a team building an excellent software product? To guide your team to greatness, you have to be a great technical leader. A great tech leader does three things: know what to build, help the team build it, and help the team continuously improve. [...]
am doing two presentations today at the Scrum Gathering: Sneaky Scrum, a way to sneak Scrum into your organization From AnyCo to AwesomeCo: A Case Study in Scrum Transformation Enjoy!
I will be presenting at this year's Scrum Gathering in Orlando, March 8-10. My first presentation is Sneaky Scrum, a Pecha-Kucha, on March 9 at 8:00 in Sanibel 1 & 2: Does your organization resist Scrum? Is your boss afraid of Scrum because of the strange jargon and lack of big up front planning? Do your developers [...]
Every wonder how many Certified Scrum people there are? The Scrum Alliance web site has the answer. Scrum Alliance lists the names of all the registered certificate holders at http://www.scrumalliance.org/training. If I count correctly, these are the numbers, as of January 13, 2010: CSM CSPO CSP CSC CST Registered practitioners 53,990 3,558 908 23 105 There is [...]
The Scrum Guide is the definitive guide to Scrum. It precisely summarizes and hones the canonical sources from earlier this decade: Ken Schwaber's books, Agile Software Development with Scrum and Agile Project Management with Scrum (affiliate links). The Scrum Guide is hosted at scrum.org under the aegis of Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland.
Are you doing Scrum, or are you doing Scrum-But? Many teams use the Nokia Test to evaluate their Scrumness. Bas Vodde presented the original Nokia Test in 2006; he used it as a simple way to evaluate the Agileness of development teams at Nokia. In 2007, Jeff Sutherland adapted the Nokia Test to Scrum. Ken Schwaber recently developed a more comprehensive Scrum assessment. [...]
Nokia has a great reputation in the Agile community. Why can't we be as good as Nokia? It turns out we can. Here's my presentation from the Nokia Agile Community Autumn Meet 2010 conference in Helsinki, held on December 7. Use the Nokia Test, a simple value stream map, and Theory of Constraints, and you can transform your dev team from [...]
I presented Winning Clients with Scrum and Agile last night at ICCA Boston. Thanks to Norm for inviting me.
Ken Schwaber presented "Flacid Scrum--A New Pandemic?" last night at the Agile Bazaar. Ken's talk was a one hour overview of Scrum, with the point that if it's ScrumBut, then it's not Scrum. Scrum works because it exposes organizational impediments to success, not despite exposing impediments. Don't adapt Scrum to your organization's dysfunctions; correct them!
When is it Done? How do you know? Does your Product Owner agree? Does your customer agree? When we estimate user story size and sprint task effort, we ask ourselves how we will know when a task or a story is done. We make a list of doneness tests, and we call them acceptance criteria. In the spirit of Mike Cohn's user story template, we use [...]
Michael James of Danube recently published the Scrum cheat sheet on Refcardz. Download it, read it, and live it--it's good!
Agile for mobile These are my notes from a presentation I gave Saturday at MobiCamp Boston 2. The pitch ... or maybe it's in the product development, too Software engineering is where you spend most of your effort, time, and money when you build your mobile app Scrum can help control your software engineering effort/time/expense [...]
These are my notes from a presentation I gave Saturday at MobiCamp Boston 2. The pitch You are building a mobile app You want it to be successful How do you do that? Is there something in product development that you can control? Of course, but we all know how to build a great app, so [...]
Two team members asked, "What does 'release backlog' mean?" I drew this Venn diagram, and they both understood: Everything: The universe contains all possible product requirements. Most of them will not be included in our product. Product backlog: The product backlog contains the subset of all possible product requirements that we agree could be included in our [...]
I am now officially a Certified ScrumMaster, registered with the Scrum Alliance.
I spent two days last week at Jeff Sutherland's Certified ScrumMaster class. Jeff is one of the creators of Scrum. He is an excellent teacher with high caliber experience, not just applying Scrum, but applying Scrum well. I highly recommend Jeff's class to everyone interested in doing software development well.
