Last week at the ALM Summit, Microsoft colleague Jonathan Wanagel and I presented a talk titled Technical Interviewing Youre Doing it Wrong! and it was one of many highlights of the event. Download the slides here.

We identified eight...

I am pleased to announced I have been nominated to the Scrum Alliance Board of Directors again. This is a three year term, spanning 2013 through 2015.

I am a long way from the position. Today I submitted my summary position statement, listed...

Ive been getting a lot of requests lately of people asking for guidance for effective communication techniques when working in or with distributed agile/Scrum teams. I outline some approaches in my book, The Scrum Field Guide, but it is not all...

I had the privileged of being interviewed by Dave Prior from Projects at Work and Tom Cagley from Software Process and Measurement Cast.

• Projects at Work podcast
• SPaMCAST #193 podcast

Enjoy!

Youve just finished a great story-writing workshop with your stakeholders. Youre excited about the new product and are anxious to get started. Until, that is, you get back to your office and look at the mountain of stories that youve somehow got...

I often see Scrum teams struggle with the retrospective. Retrospectives are not easy. They take time, they take commitment, and they take courage. When the pressures on, theyre often the first thing to go. In the rush to deliver a product, having...

Even with all the good reasons to do retrospectives, they are still the first thing most teams cut when they’re feeling pressured to perform faster, deliver more, or increase quality. What’s ironic is that they are cutting the one thing that could help them both increase their velocity and quality.

We hear quite a bit that Scrum teams "need" full time ScrumMasters, but rarely do we see teams that get them. Why? Several reasons, but the biggest one is usually money. Why should a company pay for someone to keep a team healthy? 

Lets say you are on a team that is both newly formed and new to practicing agile. Your daily standup meetings appear to be going well and you are looking forward to your teams first demo. The big day comes, you get in front of the customer, and...

The job of ScrumMaster is real. It can have a big impact on costs (as illustrated in The Case for a Full-time ScrumMaster and The Scrum Field Guide), saving the company money - period. But what does a ScrumMaster do all day to justify a full-time...