Suitable agile metrics reflect either a team’s progress in becoming agile or your organization’s progress in becoming a learning organization.
At the team level, qualitative agile metrics often work better than quantitative metrics. At the organizational level, this is reversed: quantitative agile metrics provide better insights than qualitative ones.
(more…) For years, I worked in several Berlin-based, fast-growing startups in my capacity as Scrum Master, agile coach, and Product Owner. These are my lessons learned on making Agile work — including Scrum as a framework — in a fast-growing startup. Also, let me introduce you to the anti-patterns agile startups shall avoid at all costs.
(more…) Garbage in, garbage out: No matter whether your team chose Scrum for the right purpose—solving complex, adaptive problems. No matter whether your Scrum Team’s product quality is top-notch or whether your teammates embrace self-management to the fullest. If your Product Backlog is not up to the job, all of these accomplishments will account for little, as your team will provide less value to its customers than possible. Here is where the forensic Product Backlog analysis steps in, a light-weight, simple practice to help Product Owners and Scrum Masters unearth anti-patterns that led to your low-value Product Backlog.
Learn more on how a piece of paper and a pencil can turn around the perception of your Scrum Team among stakeholders and customers.
(more…) Like a job ad for a Scrum Master position, the equivalent for the Product Owner position also reveals excellent insight into an organization’s progress on becoming agile. Yesterday, I analyzed 60-plus randomly selected job ads from the UK, the US, and Germany for that purpose. Learn more about what makes job ads such a treasure trove with the following 23 Product Owner anti-patterns.
(more…) Are you considering a new Scrum Master job? However, you are not sure that it is the right organization? Don’t worry; there are four steps of proactive research to identify suitable employers or clients for Scrum Masters and avoid disappointment later.
I have used those four steps for years to identify organizations I would like to work with, and they never failed me. Read on and learn how to employ search-engines, LinkedIn’s people search, reaching out to peers in the agile community, and analyzing the event markets in the quest for your next Scrum Master job.
(more…) Job ads for Scrum Master positions reveal great insight into an organization’s progress on becoming agile. I analyzed more than 50 job ads for Scrum Master positions to gain these. Learn more about what makes job ads such a treasure trove with the following 22 Scrum Master anti-patterns derived from job ads.
(more…) While the new Scrum Guide is less prescriptive and more inclusive, it also ties loose ends by including elements better, namely the previously free-floating Sprint Goal and the Definition of Done with the creation of Scrum commitments. This inclusion works remarkably well in the former’s case; regarding the latter, we need a shoehorn, though.
Read more on how you can use the Scrum Guide 2020 Reordered to spot patterns quickly.
(more…) The Scrum Guide 2020 is available now: Change is coming to make Scrum more accessible and inclusive beyond software development. Learn more about the changes, download the brand new and free Scrum Guide 2020 Reordered to spot patterns quickly, and join the Scrum community discussion.
(more…) Scrum has proven time and again to be the most popular framework for software development. Given that software is eating the world, a seasoned Scrum Master is nowadays in high demand. And that demand causes the market-entry of new professionals from other project management branches, probably believing that reading one or two Scrum books will be sufficient. Which makes a suitable set of Scrum Master interview question more necessary than ever to help you identify suitable candidates.
If you are looking to fill a position for a Scrum Master (or agile coach) in your organization, you may find the following 47 Scrum Master interview questions useful to identify the right candidate. They are derived from my fourteen years of practical experience with XP as well as Scrum, serving both as Product Owner and Scrum Master as well as interviewing dozens of Scrum Master candidates on behalf of my clients.
(more…) What looked like a good idea back in the 1990ies—outsourcing software development as a non-essential business area—has meanwhile massively backfired for a lot of legacy organizations. While they try to become more appealing to product and software developers, they still have difficulties understanding what it takes to build an attractive product/engineering culture. Learn more about typical anti-patterns and signs that an organization is causing a toxic team culture, impeding its efforts to become agile.
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