…Do Scrum Masters Introduce Agile Practices to Reluctant Teams? Many practices will be foreign to a team first adopting agile. Team members may disagree on the importance of some Scrum practices or about how they should be implemented. Teams often hesitate when first introduced to agile practices like overlapping work…

…a Scrum Master or agile coach will get the team to talk through their differences. But before doing that, it’s critical to get everyone to agree on the type of estimate. I recommend having team members agree to provide the median estimate of the effort. Think of it as a…

…want to adopt an agile project management approach and foster agile teamwork. For example, when I first began to consult for a certain California-based game studio, its teams were organized around the specific elements and objects that would exist in the video game it was developing. There was a separate…

…rapidly changing information. In agile projects, writing typically works best as a way to prompt a conversation or document one. (That’s why user stories start as placeholders for conversations, not comprehensive requirements.) To show just how unreliable words can be, I’d like to share two stories—one about the ambiguity inherent…

…6th principle of the Agile Manifesto reads, “The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.” Now raise your hand if your team is physically in the same space for each and every daily scrum meeting you conduct. I would bet…

…Golden Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us…

…common struggles faced by agile teams is the need to split user stories. I'm sure you've struggled with this. I certainly did at first. In fact, when I first began using Scrum, some of our product backlog items were so big that we occasionally opted for six-week sprints. With a…

…paper, and include useful agile reference material printed inside the covers. They’re available in Scrum Master, Product Owner, and general agile versions. Planning Poker Cards We’ve printed over 100,000 decks of these over the years. Once the remaining decks are gone, that’s it. We won’t be making or selling Planning…

What does agile software development and running have in common? I like to run, but I'm really bad at it. Not as bad as I used to be, though. I used to get bored or tired after three miles of a planned six-mile run and stop. I broke that habit…

…all the hype about agile software development processes, but you are left wondering, if there’s so much to like about agile, why do some team members resist it so strongly? You also want to know how to overcome the many excuses people give for why agile can never work for…

…the first phase of agile software development have been about very specific practices we should employ. There are some excellent books on the Extreme Programming, Feature–Driven Development and Scrum agile processes. These books teach us “do a, b, and c if you want to do Extreme Programming” or “do x,…

…of the challenges of agile development is coming to grips with the role of leaders and managers of self-organizing teams. Many would-be ScrumMasters and agile coaches go to the extreme of refusing to exert any influence on their teams at all. Others retain too much of their prior command-and-control management…

…What, Not How On agile projects, the product owner is responsible for product strategy: what gets created, and in what order. Product owners are not, however, responsible for the development process (how the features are created)–the team has that accountability–or exactly how much work the team brings into each sprint.…