Every Agile Coach or Scrum Master should know this game! It’s the standard we use to ease people into the world of iterative development, especially Scrum. You likely played it when you learned about Scrum. If not, I urge you to check it out. And this article is about the Ball Point Game, how to facilitate it, and what it can teach us.
Retrospectives can turn into mere problem discussions yielding little positive impact on the work of a Scrum team. Here is how you can ensure insanely effective Sprint Retrospectives with an easy to follow 7 steps template.
Are your retros effective? Do only discuss problems or does the team actually improve continuously? Here is my proven template for effective retrospectives.
A common question I get: How do we demo virtual deliverables in the Sprint Review or System Demo? If we only have a backend or a library to show, how can we best do it? Let me give a few tips in this week’s article.
Alright, do you measure the effectiveness of product owners by how much time they devote to writing great user stories? Many do – more or less explicitly. But there is a hard truth: The better the Product Owner, the less time they spend writing user stories ?!
Whether you use SAFe, LeSS, Scrum, Kanban … is NOT the important success factor for agility. Just as picking the best electric guitar is not gonna make you a rock star. ? Frameworks and models are just 20% of what makes you agile. What really makes or breaks agility?...
How many times have you seen sprint reviews without stakeholders? I must admit, I have seen this far too often in my life. And it's a waste of time! Why is it useless? First we have to ask, what the purpose of a review is. I often get answers like: ? to see the...
Sprints need a goal! Just handing out unconnected stories to developers is NOT agile. Product Owners are not only responsible to create and have a product vision, they're also responsible to COMMUNICATE that vision to the developers. ? Stop handing out tasks to...
So many companies struggle with their move to agility - why is that? Chances are you know or are part of a company whose agile transformation got stuck half-way and failed to deliver the big promises of agility. At this point you may doubt whether agility really works...
I hear this statement a lot recently. Companies claiming they tried to do Scrum, but even after a year or more it didn't work for them. I disagree – let me tell you why. Scrum is one of several agile frameworks you can use to set your company up for a VUCA world. It...