How to take Scrum Values from Paper to Practice
At first glance, the five Scrum values seem like a no-brainer: Commitment, focus, openness, respect, and courage. But often, there isn’t one version of the truth. Without clarifying what these values mean in Scrum, the team is left to interpret what these values mean through the lens of their own experience and cultural norms. Commitment […]
Common Habits That Keep You From Sustaining A Healthy Product Backlog
A product backlog orders tasks into a list and prioritizes them, so the developers know which items to deliver first. The roadmap and its requirements provide the foundation for the backlog, which usually consist of the following elements: user stories, bug fixes and features. Although the whole scrum team works jointly on the product backlog […]
Improving your code quality
Do you know what’s common in the universe and customers’ expectations? Both of them keep growing at an increasing speed. You might even argue that neither of them has any apparent borders, but this might not be true for the former… Anyway, if you and your team want to keep up with the ever-increasing demands […]
Should we have all sprint tasks assigned at sprint planning?
Sprint Tasks Tips: Staying Focused when Agile Sprint Planning Assigning tasks at sprint planning makes us task-driven or more focused on our tasks than the goal of the sprint. For some time, it looks like we’re making rapid improvements until some tasks get blocked. Then, we just move on only to later on realize that […]
Team members in distant time zones
What should we do if our team members are in distant time zones? Team members can be difficult to manage when they’re in distant time zones because the time overlap is so small that there’s not enough opportunity to collaborate or participate in events. So, how do you turn things around, empower your team members […]
Leading with Kindness: Nice to Have or Necessity?
In an Agile environment, you don’t have to be nice. But you should always be kind. Leaders should be: [Fill in the blank.] Depending on whether you’re a traditionalist, boomer, Gen X, millennial, or Gen Z, you probably have very different perspectives on what leadership looks like and how leaders should act. In recent years, […]
The Symbiotic Relationship between Sprint Backlogs and Product Backlogs
The Symbiotic Relationship between Sprint Backlogs and Product Backlogs If you’re new to the Scrum methodology, the difference between Sprint Backlog and Product Backlog can be a head-scratcher. Let’s take a quick look at these tools. Ready, set, go! What is the Product Backlog? Essentially, a Product Backlog (PB) is a dynamic list of potential […]
For High-Definition Planning, Plan Sprints Backward
For High-Definition Planning, Plan Sprints Backward Most scrum teams start their sprint planning from day 1 – from the sprint start – and then plan the rest of their sprint moving forward. This usually results in ‘happy path’ plans that often don’t consider potential risks and pitfalls. Instead of planning how stories and other backlog […]
8 Companies Who Employed Smart Thinking to Pivot During COVID-19
8 Companies Who Employed Smart Thinking to Pivot During COVID-19 Towards the start of the pandemic, we championed the stories of seven companies, from seven industries, who had made smart changes to their business models to thrive during COVID-19. From in-person baking classes moved online, to whole retail chains gone dark to support home deliveries […]
Boost your Career with a CSM Certification
Boost your Career with a CSM Certification A CSM certification is an invaluable addition to your resume. But it’s more than just that! It can significantly help you with your professional life, and also greatly benefit the organization you work for. 9 ways getting a CSM certification can benefit your career Certified ScrumMasters earn […]