Scrum Masters coach, mentor, guide, and enable their teams to develop great products. For a new team in an organization that is also new to Scrum, this can be a challenging and time-consuming job. At first, a Scrum Master may…
We're entering flu season. No, no, I feel fine. And you won't catch anything from me just by reading this. But flu seasons means some of your teammates are bound to be sick soon. And that means they'll occasionally stay…
Some teams use the sprint review as a time for product owners or key stakeholders to formally approve the product backlog items completed during the sprint. Is this a good idea? In general, a sprint review should not be used…
Story points are a unit of measure for expressing an estimate of the overall effort that will be required to fully implement a product backlog item or any other piece of work. When we estimate with story points, we assign…
If you work on a Scrum team, you undoubtedly know you should have a product backlog and product owner. But what, exactly, is a product? For some teams, this can be a rather fundamental question. After all, an organization cannot…
I recently emailed everyone who subscribes to my weekly tips a list of suggestions for ways to motivate team members to arrive on time to the daily scrum. For example, many teams have a rule that if you arrive late,…
Back when I was writing Agile Estimating and Planning (the 2005 book, but now it’s also a video course), I had already been studying and experimenting with estimating approaches for five years. By conducting experiments with various teams, especially those…
Planning Poker relies on relative estimating, in which the item being estimated is compared to one or more previously estimated items. It is the ratio between items that is important. An item estimated as 10 units of work (generally, story…
I spoke with a Scrum Master recently who told me his team had nearly doubled their velocity in only two months. Rather than be happy about this, though, he was concerned. He knew the team had not suddenly become twice…
Many teams have at least a moderate ability to plan and control their time. They're able to say, "We will work on these things over the coming sprint," and have a somewhat reasonable expectation of that being the case. And…