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Scrum

What is Scrum?

This week’s blog post is based on a chapter from our book, Scrum 101: the most frequently asked questions about Agile with Scrum, which is available to buy for £9.90. Scrum is a framework that can be used to help apply the core values and principles of the Agile Manifesto (Beck et al.,… Read More »What is Scrum?

The origins of Scrum

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This week’s blog post is based on a chapter from our book, Scrum 101: the most frequently asked questions about Agile with Scrum, which is available to buy for $12.60.   The ‘rugby approach’ was first described by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka in a Harvard Business Review article in 1986 titled… Read More »The origins of Scrum

Transparency – The Missing Pillar

There are three pillars underpinning any empirical process: transparency, inspection and adaptation. Teams are generally familiar with inspection and adaptation, after all, frameworks like Scrum are quite prescriptive about the need for retrospectives. Teams often overlook transparency. There are a number of ways in which a team can be transparent. Firstly, they can… Read More »Transparency – The Missing Pillar

An Obsession with Labels

Having spent the last 5 years working in retail, and specifically high end fashion, I’ve seen a lot of obsessing over labels. You might expect that of the retail fashion industry, but it seems this obsession with labels has made its way into the software development community too. Using a framework like Scrum is… Read More »An Obsession with Labels

Scaled Scrum is just Scrum

I’ve always been a believer that, rather than focusing on scaling agile, you should just focus on being Agile. However, over the last few years, a number of frameworks have emerged with the aim of ‘scaling’ Agile. SAFe and LeSS are two such examples of scaling frameworks. Scrum.org has now… Read More »Scaled Scrum is just Scrum

Health checks

There are lots of ‘health check models’ out there. Most of them attempt to summarise and visualise how teams are doing, and seek areas of improvements. They are sometimes run by managers, sometimes by coaches, sometimes by teams in workshops. Over the years, I have discarded approaches that ‘score’ teams… Read More »Health checks

Scrum & Kanban playlist

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It’s time to throw out that Christmas CD. Seriously, I don’t want to listen to Lennon’s So This Is Christmas ever again. The alternative? Our tongue-in-cheek agile and lean-related playlist. It was born during lunch at this year’s Kanban retreat in Lisbon. Even Flow by Pearl Jam was an early… Read More »Scrum & Kanban playlist

New movie: “Bad stand-up”

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How effective are your daily stand-ups? Do you think you could spot bad traits if they happened? Could you spot them in others’ meetings? Some of you will remember that, at this year’s Scrum Alliance retreat, a bunch of us identified that many Scrum Masters don’t have a support network… Read More »New movie: “Bad stand-up”