Scrum

Values provide direction for a team’s work. Scrum consists of five values essential for a Scrum Team to succeed. As a Scrum Master, I often consider how practices support Scrum values, allowing us to align new initiatives with Scrum. Our mobbing experiment is still ongoing, which leads me to think about how mobbing supports Scrum Values. The Scrum Team commits to achieving its goals and to supporting each other. Their primary focus is on the work of the Sprint to make the best possible progress toward these goals. The Scrum Team and its stakeholders are open about the work and the challenges. Scrum Team members respect each other to be capable, independent people, and are respected as such by the people with whom they work. The Scrum Team members have the courage to do the right thing, to work on tough problems. ...

More teams within my company have been adopting the Scrum framework to enhance their product development process. Occasionally, I have the opportunity to engage in conversations with the developers and Scrum Masters from these teams. Among the various comments and discussions about Scrum, the most common issue raised is the abundance of lengthy meetings. Their managers complain that their teams are spending more time in meetings since implementing Scrum. However, is this issue truly caused by Scrum? When I presented my team’s weekly calendar to them, they were astonished by its brevity and simplicity. ...

As a Scrum Master of the team, I often raise questions to stimulate the team’s discussion and improve their understanding of Scrum and other frameworks or practices we use. “It’s Thursday and the fourth day of our 5-day Sprint,” I said, “If I pull a Product Backlog Item from the Backlog, I have to finish it by tomorrow, or else the Work Item Age will be increased by 2. Should I pull it or slice it to guarantee I can finish it by tomorrow?” ...

It has been over three months since I introduced Flow Metrics to my team. My team has changed their mindset when it comes to work. Today, I am going to discuss how I apply Flow Metrics to the team. Before implementing Flow Metrics, I created a spreadsheet and recorded all the Product Backlog Items (PBIs) created in 2023. Following Daniel Vacanti’s Flow Metrics for Scrum Team, the spreadsheet includes an Aging Work in Progress Chart, Cycle Time Scatterplot, and two Monte Carlo Simulations: “How Many” and “How Long.” I obtained the Service Level Expectation (SLE) for the Cycle Time. ...

Last month, I wrote a blog post about why I have refrained from using Story Points and capacity estimation in my team since day one. I have been delving deeper into Kanban and immersing myself in the materials, and I have started implementing it. After introducing Kanban and Flow Metrics to my team, I received a lot of questions and feedback from them. Kanban is a strategy for optimizing the flow of value through a process that uses a visual, pull-based system. There may be various ways to define value, including consideration of the needs of the customer, the end-user, the organization, and the environment, for example. ...

When I first practised Agile on my old team, one of the things I learned from the consultants was Story Points. Since then, it has been used in many product teams in my company. As all the teams use Scrum as the main framework, many colleagues even misunderstand Stories and Story Points as Scrum ideas. They’re actually from Extreme Programming. Stories Points were invented by Ron Jeffries, one of the three founders of Extreme Programming. They were invented to abstract from hours to complete an item. With the Fibonacci series, developers can easily say the bigger the Story Point is, the more complex the Product Backlog Item is, and the more uncertainty in developing the Product Backlog Item could be. Developers can use empiricism to vote for the size of a Product Backlog Item. With the aid of the velocity trend, they can select the Product Backlog Items into their Sprint Backlog. ...

I wrote a blog post in April on studying for Professional Scrum Master (PSM) II. Last week, I took the exam and scored 100%. PSM II was called Professional Scrum Practitioner (PSP) before 2016. After that, it was renamed PSM II to bridge the gap between PSM I and PSM III. This exam focuses on applying Scrum in the workplace, as evidenced by its old name. Without extensive experience working as a Scrum Master, this exam would be challenging. Luckily, I have over five years of experience working in all the Scrum accountabilities. ...

As a mentor of two new Scrum Masters working in teams with little to no knowledge of Scrum, I often face challenging questions. My usual reaction is not to give them a direct answer at first. During one of the lectures, an Agile coach emphasised having a 2-week Sprint. Perhaps his speech was very effective. Perhaps there are some misunderstandings. A mentee who had been working in a team that runs a 4-week Sprint asked me whether he should ask the team to change to a 2-week Sprint. I asked him why he wanted to change to a 2-week Sprint. ...

Recently, my company launched a training programme for new Agile coaches. As one of the members of the company’s Agile coaches, I’m responsible for teaching the candidates basic knowledge and assisting them in on-job training. It’s been 4 months since I passed PSM I and PSPO I. It’s time to refresh the knowledge I acquired during the exam preparation. I also wanted to test how much memory I left. Therefore, I took the initiative in presenting the introduction to Agile and Scrum. ...

Last month, I wrote a blog post about taking professional exams. My goal was to pass 2 certifications, Professional Scrum Master (PSM) I and Professional Scrum Product Owner (PSPO) I, at the end of the year. 18 days later, I completed the challenge. PSM and PSPO are the certificates offered by Scrum.org to validate the knowledge of the Scrum framework. The names are self-explanatory. PSM focuses on Scrum Masters who understand how to apply Scrum, and PSPO focuses on Product Owners who enable value creation and delivery. Both certifications consist of 3 levels. Level 1 covers the fundamental understanding. ...