There is no definite consensus on the need for risk management within the Agile method. This has led many to believe that risk management is irrelevant in an iterative model. Some follow the approach of ignoring risks until they manifest into issu...

In Scrum: The Unity of Knowing and Doing, I discussed the two basic abilities of human beings: knowing and doing. In terms of Scrum, inspection is about knowing, adaption is about doing, and transparency unites knowing and doing. From a team persp...

I would like to pose the question, Why not merge roles in Scrum? I'll begin not by talking about Scrum specifically, but by taking a different approach and using an example. The world of colors We recognize three primary colors: red, blue, and...

As we all know, the Agile Manifesto was authored at a ski lodge in Utah in 2001. These important guidelines and principles drive much of what we do. These simple, elegant words are very difficult to use in the real world and sometimes, in my opini...

Background When I attended the February 2013 Agile SoCal group meeting in Orange County, California, the main event was a presentation by George Schlitz, founder of BigVisible Solutions. The title of this presentation was Agile Beyond the Teams ...

When I took my first Certified ScrumMaster course, I was taught that one of the responsibilities of the ScrumMaster is to educate. The role of educator is an increasingly important one, as we see more and more organizations adopting Scrum at the e...

In Scrum, velocity is how much product backlog effort a team can handle in one sprint. This can be estimated by viewing previous sprints, assuming the team composition and sprint duration are kept constant. Velocity is used in sprint planning to f...

When some people talk about the future of Agile approaches, and Scrum in particular, they consider the spread of Scrum outside of IT. To properly accompany the Agile transition to another world, I think that asking how to move Agile outward from I...

Please don't excommunicate me! This article may seem a little Machiavellian, because it is. There's a lot of soft stuff talked about business change. Anyone who's implementing Scrum in a Waterfall-centric organization will understand that the rea...

The cleverness and dexterity of Egyptian workmanship, as evidenced in the pyramids, is magnificent. In them we can see the unlimited human capacity for imagination and architecture. Even today, researchers still study the organizational chart and ...

Introduction Contracting and billing models have always been a point of debate in the IT world. Fixed price or time and material? Which one to select? Both models have been criticized for their biased features toward vendor or customer, but this ...

Agile teams find a lot of benefit from external coaching. Especially teams who, for whatever reasons, have not been focusing on continuous improvement. In my experience as an Agile coach, I've come across many situations where I could add value as...

How long does it take an organization to reorganize in order to adopt Scrum? Three hours. Really. Background and goal Bank of America's Merrill Lynch (BAML) Global Securities Operations Technology decided to adopt Scrum and needed some c...

The Scrum Primer is an in-depth introduction to the theory and practice of Scrum, and includes data on results from a large-scale corporate adoption of Scrum. Its authors are Certified Scrum TrainersGabrielle Benefield,Pete Deemer,Craig Larman, andBas Vodde. You can download the Scrum Primerhere.