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Scrum Master Tip: Hang Back
I taught a Professional Scrum Foundations for Teams (PSF) class this week. A core part of the PSF is a series of compressed Scrum Sprints where the students work together to build simple websites. One of the scrum masters this week’s class had fantastic technical skills and was the team’s technical lead in “real life”. …
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VSLive Austin 2016: Real World Scrum with TFS2015 Slides
I spoke at VSLive Austin 2016 last week. As promised, here are my slides and code for my Scrum + TFS2015 talk. Real World Scrum with Team Foundation Server 2015 & Visual Studio Team Services You’ve got Team Foundation Server 2015 and you’re looking to do Scrum. Ok. Great. Now what does that mean? What…
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5 Reasons to Care About Scrum Now That Waterfall’s Dead
How do you lead change in your software organization? How do you get your teams to care about doing a good job? How do you get them motivated to try new things and/or improve? It’s been 14 years since the Agile Manifesto and Scrum’s not so young anymore. The idea that Agile and Scrum are…
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CC BOS 2015: “Good to Great Scrum Master”
As promised, here are the slides from the Top 10 Ways to Go from Good to Great Scrum Master talk that I did last weekend at Code Camp Boston 2015. Here’s the abstract: The Scrum Master role in an organization can be difficult. You live between a rock and a hard place. You’re influential but you…
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CC BOS 2015: “Coaching Skills for Scrum Masters & The Self-Organizing Team”
As promised, here are the slides from the Coaching Skills for Scrum Masters & The Self-Organizing Team talk that I did last weekend at Code Camp Boston 2015. Here’s the abstract: Scrum works best with — arguably, requires — a self-organizing team. If you want a high-performing and self-organizing team, it helps if your Scrum…
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What’s your Definition of Done (DoD)?
In software, there’s nothing closer to a magical, silver bullet than a written Definition of Done (DoD). A Definition of Done is typically created by each team and it describes all the items that have to be completed in order to call something Done. Why do you need a DoD? Well, have you ever had…
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New “Scrum Master Skills” Course at Pluralsight
My new Scrum Master Skills course just went live on Pluralsight! Here’s the course description: The Scrum Master role in an organization can be difficult. You live between a rock and a hard place. You’re influential but you probably don’t have any real power. You’re not a project manager but you’re still kind of on the…
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Slides: “Coaching Skills for Scrum Masters & The Self-Organizing Team” from ALM Chicago
I just wrapped up speaking at ALM Chicago 2015. (Had a great time, BTW.) As promised, here are my slides from my talk. Coaching Skills for Scrum Masters & The Self-Organizing Team Scrum works best with — arguably, requires — a self-organizing team. If you want a high-performing and self-organizing team, it helps if your…
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Zen & the Art of the Scrum Timebox
Everything that happens in Scrum happens within a ‘timebox’. There’s the 30 day (or less) overall Sprint and then there are timeboxes for the events within a Sprint. There’s 8 hours (or less) for the Sprint Planning Meeting. The Daily Scrum gets 15 minutes. Then 4 hours (or less) for the Sprint Review followed by…
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4 Ways to Fail at Scrum Planning Poker
If you’re doing Scrum, chances are high that you use or at least have heard of Planning Poker. (By my estimates, I’d say that somewhere between 0 and 100% of teams use it.) It’s a simple and effective way to do software estimation that’s easy to understand and implement. Considering how simple it is, you’d…