Scrum

Advanced Scrum Product Ownership — Riding Dinosaurs

What does Scrum Product Ownership have to do with Dinosaurs? We typically say that Scrum Masters get to herd cats. But Scrum Product Owners actually need to learn how to ride a Dinosaur! With the click-bate established, what does that even mean? I’ve been using a visualization that people find useful for understanding the relationship …

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Agile for Humans Episode 108 – Professional Scrum with Kanban Interview

Yuval Yeret joined Ryan Ripley  to discuss scrum and kanban sitting in a tree…along with the new Professional Scrum with Kanban course from Scrum.org In this episode you’ll discover:

Improving SAFe thru Professional Scrum

SAFe includes Scrum — so how come many Scrum practitioners and thought leaders consider it unsafe? The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe™) is one of the most popular approaches to applying agile at scale out there. SAFe’s perspective is that “Nothing beats an Agile Team” and it doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel or even innovate too much when …

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The Sprint Increment Is Dead

The Sprint Increment Got Us Here If you’re a veteran of the software industry, you probably remember those days where we released to production/GA every couple of months. Heck, many of the companies I meet these days still work that way. If you’re also an experienced Scrum practitioner, you probably associate the time you started to …

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Scrum and Kanban — Stronger Together

Over the years I’ve been leading the charge when it comes to creating mashups and hybrids of approaches such as Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, LeSS, whatever. Mashups and hybrids can be very attractive as they can be an excuse for taking what you like from each approach and leaving behind the hard stuff. In mashing up …

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Making Agile Teams work in real life – The quest for Stable Feature Teams?

Context This post is inspired by my experience trying to help organizations make agile teams work in real life. It is heavily inspired or can even be called a revision of a post from a couple of years ago on the Lean/Kanban approach to teams. If you look at the Agile Manifesto, you can find …

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Do Craig Larman’s Laws of Organizational Behavior really mean we always need to start with a structural change? What do they say about starting with Kanban?

I’ve been following Craig Larman’s work for a while now. I find the books he wrote with Bas Vodde on scaling agile to be very insightful and actionable. I recently discovered Craig’s “Laws of Organizational Behavior”: 1. Organizations are implicitly optimized to avoid changing the status quo middle- and first-level manager and “specialist” positions & …

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Kanban FAQ: Should I FINISH what I’m working on or help the team READY new work items?

Once people start to get “Stop Starting Start Finishing” thinking (Kanban) or the “Focus on the current sprint” thinking (Scrum) a frequent question that comes up is how to deal with people who are required for different activities throughout the work life cycle. Some example scenarios: “I’m a tester who both participates in ATDD spec. …

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Explaining MVPs, MVFs, MMFs via the Lean/Agile Requirements Dinosaur

I’ve been using a visualization that people find useful for understanding the relationship between the various Lean/Agile requirement containers. Some people call the full model a dinosaur. Others are reminded of the snake who ate an elephant from “The Little Prince”. (I’m sure there is a good connection to elephant carpaccio somewhere in here …) The …

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Implementing the Kanban Method using Scrum (a.k.a Scrum with a Kanban spirit)

Warning: If my last postrattled your cage, let’s see how you like this one… This post is a thought experiment. This hasn’t been tried in the field, and might be the worst idea in the world. But at a minimum it might be a way to understand better Scrum and Kanban. Let me know what …

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