I keep hearing the need for "Growth Mindset," "Collaboration," "Empathy," etc. while describing the characteristics of agile teams. However, I rarely see someone highlighting the need for the "courage to speak up" in agile teams. Every day, I see that…
I have seen many “Agile teams” working quietly without talking to their teammates. Every day they are at work sharp 9 AM, pick up a user story from the backlog, finish it and go. Their interaction with other team members…
Some time back I attended a session on raising resilient kids. I learnt that building resilience is all about building the ability to bounce back and learn from all kinds of adversity—including setbacks, threats, stress and trauma. Here are some…
One of the biggest challenges facing the Scrum community is understanding the role of Product Owner(PO). Most of the Scrum teams believe that PO is a mediator between the customer and the teams. That is, there is a strong belief…
It is a common practice to look at successful people and learn the “best practices” as much as possible. The belief is that, by copying the successful practices, we become successful as well. My question is, does that really work…
Every team goes through some stages of conflict before they stabilize. Leaders need to be conscious of intervening during such conflicts. The knee-jerk reaction of a typical leader observing a conflict is to jump immediately to “fix” the problem. It…
Here is my recent guest post for Zephyr… Performing Testing in Agile projects is not termed as Agile testing. Agile testing involves whole different mindset. Then, how do you know your team has Agile testing…
Here is a short article for Zephyr’s guest blog Scrum recommends 3 roles, the Product Owner, Scrum Master and the team. There is no dedicated role as a tester (or QA) if you are following pure Scrum. Agile also recommends…
Here is a short article for Zephyr’s guest blog Scrum recommends 3 roles, the Product Owner, Scrum Master and the team. There is no dedicated role as a tester (or QA) if you are following pure Scrum. Agile also recommends…
I had the privilege of speaking at Scrum Australia 2014 conference couple of months ago. It was a fascinating experience to stand in front of such an energetic and knowledgeable audience and share ideas. Scrum Australia team had put a…