scrum

Daily scrum standup meeting 4 Ways to Restore Purpose to Your Daily Scrum

The daily scrum was created to help the Scrum team meet its sprint goal. Unfortunately, answering the three daily questions can turn a synchronization and planning meeting into a status report. Here are four ways to make sure your team members are collaborating about their work and are ready to tackle the next day.

Ryan Ripley's picture
Ryan Ripley
Team grouped around a computer Growing Generalized Specialists on an Agile Team

A generalized specialist is not a jack of all trades. It is an individual with deep knowledge in a particular specialization who also has learned to be productive in other team roles. Here are some tips on how to grow generalized specialists on your team in order to maximize your team's productivity potential.

Jeffery Payne's picture
Jeffery Payne
Many people all putting their hands in To Improve Agile Teamwork, Think about the Individuals

Given the emphasis on teams, it can be easy to forget that agile has the value of individuals and interactions as a central principle. As much as an effective team dynamic is what makes Scrum work, teams are composed of individual people, and it’s important to acknowledge each person's role and to express appreciation.

Steve Berczuk's picture
Steve Berczuk
Someone about to plunge into water Catch Small Failures Early with Agile Practices

Agile is designed to keep failures small and manageable. It’s essential to be able to talk about small failures and ways to improve during the retrospective so that the teams can advance their agile practices. If your teams can’t talk about their small failures openly, there is a great risk of bigger troubles soon.

Ryan Ripley's picture
Ryan Ripley
Team having an agile standup meeting 5 Tips for Making the Most of Your Agile Meetings

People think agile entails too many meetings, but usually that complaint has nothing to do with the number of meetings, but rather the way they're run. New agile teams often do everything together because they think that’s what agile expects, but that's not true. Here are five tips to better run your agile meetings.

Jeffery Payne's picture
Jeffery Payne
Two cords bound together How to Communicate to Build Trust on a Scrum Team

Trust among the ScrumMaster, product owner, and development team is essential to making the process work. Transparency, inspection, and adaptation are the three pillars of Scrum, and you can't commit to these actions if everyone doesn’t have openness and respect for each other. Communication is the best way to do that.

Steve Berczuk's picture
Steve Berczuk
Shirt tag saying "One size does not fit all" What’s Your “Size” of Agile?

There are approaches to agile that sound great on paper, but will they really be the best choice for your team in practice? Instead of standardizing on any form of agile, think about the results you want. Why not create the environment that works best for you? There's more than one way to do agile.

Johanna Rothman's picture
Johanna Rothman
Scrum standup meeting Tester Contributions to Scrum Conversations

Scrum is one of the most popular paths to agile, but testers sometimes join this framework as an afterthought and aren’t quite sure how they fit into the development flow. Scrum is more than answering three daily questions, and testers are in a position to understand the project better than anyone else on the team.

Justin Rohrman's picture
Justin Rohrman