The Penguin Principle for Agile transformations — I was in the fifth and final round for a Product Owner position. I remember being tired of responding to all kinds of questions, often the same I had answered before. Especially considering I already jumped through quite a few hoops— I had completed a personality test and an intelligence…

What makes the Scrum Master role so extraordinarily demanding? — If you’ve seen Scrum being introduced at a company, then you probably have seen this before. The company is starting with Scrum and a Scrum Master is suddenly needed. The company asks a team who wants to be a Scrum Master. …

Splitting User Stories into more User Stories often means you are deceiving yourself (and your users too!) — Nussi Einhorn posted the following picture on LinkedIn: The left-hand side of the image portrays a confusing mess of User Stories. Try scanning them and getting the gist — you won’t. The right-hand side of the picture showcases a crisp and clear alternative by using descriptive titles that summarize the…

Crafting a clear and overarching Sprint Goal during Sprint Planning — Boxer Mike Tyson once said: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” — Mike Tyson In military warfare a similar saying exists: “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” — Helmuth von Moltke the Elder No matter how much time you spend planning, you can…

On LinkedIn, I gave my connections and followers the opportunity to ask any burning question they might have related to refinement. I’ve bundled all the questions anonymously here together with my answers. I also sometimes bundled together variations on the same question (or because my answer to them is related). What is the purpose of refinement? …

Uncommon sense in software development: Roadmaps are not planning all your features together with specific timelines MVP is not a release. Being Agile is useless without Doing Agile. If you expect your velocity to keep on increasing then you don’t understand velocity. Delivering working code is a slow and expensive…

“Let’s create a RACI matrix.” A statement that makes many leaders and managers feel warm and fuzzy inside. Finally all our responsibility confusion will be absolved and replaced with clarity! The matrix clarifies roles and responsibilities. Who is informed, consulted, responsible and accountable. …

If your work is perfectly plannable and predictable: don’t do Scrum. If you do not want empowered teams: don’t do Scrum. If you don’t want to disrupt your organization or upheave your organizational structure to empower teams: don’t do Scrum. If you want an exhaustive set of rules to follow…

Invoking the immutability rule to disallow the gradual introduction of Scrum is nonsensical — Imagine that you’re in a situation of being able to introduce a team to Scrum where they don’t have any experience with the framework. How would you approach this? If you read the Scrum Guide, some Scrum practitioners interpret it to mean that there’s only one approach for introducing Scrum…