Do you know how to scale Scrum?

Find out with a short test? A single instance of Scrum has one Scrum Team that works from one Product Backlog. The team sprints against the selected Product Backlog items and creates an increment of potentially shippable, or usable, functionality by the end of the Sprint If you want to test your knowledge of scaling … Continue reading →

Scrum Scaled for Large Projects and Organizational Initiatives

Jeff Sutherland and I have helped hundreds of organizations scale their projects, enable their entire product development, and thread Scrum through their organizations. For sure, none of them were easy, and each had its own unique challenges. Each had its own structure, culture, goals and strategies, challenges, current practices and infrastructure, domains of competence, existing … Continue reading →

One of those days

unSAFe at any speed

The boys from RUP (Rational Unified Process) are back. Building on the profound failure of RUP, they are now pushing the Scaled Agile Framework (e) as a simple, one-size fits all approach to the agile organization. They have made their approach even more complicated by partnering with Rally, a tools vendor. Consultants are available to … Continue reading →

Scrum Guide 2013

Jeff and I have been working on the next revisions to the Scrum Guide. We will be presenting a webinar about it within a month or so. We first presented and published Scrum in 1995 at an OOPSLA conference in Tampa, Florida. Almost twenty years have passed. Agile and Scrum have succeeded far beyond our … Continue reading →

Agile Fad?

At a recent conference, one speaker stated that the days of the agile movement are just about over. He said that the software industry has new fads every ten years, and agile was over ten years old. The Agile Manifesto was written to express shared values of people who saw a new way of developing … Continue reading →

Scrum and Continuous Improvement

Organizations usually don’t adopt Scrum because they like its name. Instead, they have heard that software development is better if they use Scrum – quicker, cheaper, higher quality, more satisfied customers and employees. Sometimes things are so bad in software development that they try Scrum just because it wasn’t what they were doing before. However, … Continue reading →

What Comes After Scrum?

Scrum is not the be-all and end-all process for software and product development. As many of you have noticed, it is barely a process, only a framework. You have to provide all the development, management, product management, and people practices. So, what does Scrum provide? It provides a labeled- environment within which complex development can … Continue reading →

Happy Holidays

Jeff Sutherland and I were thinking about what we could give to the Scrum community this holiday season. It occurred to us that a recurring question posed to us is, “How do I sell Scrum to management?” To help everyone with this issue, Jeff Sutherland and I have written a book, “Software in Thirty Days.” … Continue reading →

Happy New Year

Another year has passed. As an industry, we’ve done better. Our customers are more satisfied. One industry source reports that projects using agile practices are three times more successful than traditional, waterfall projects*. Success was defined as delivering all of the planned functionality on the planned date for the planned cost. Much of the success … Continue reading →