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...

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...

Data tells us that the best team sizes are between five and nine people, all of whom are fully dedicated to a project for the duration of the project, and who work together in a cross-functional way to deliver working software at the end of every...

The Scrum Field Guide: Practical Advice for Your First Year is now shipping (link to Amazon)! Throughout the month of April I will be giving away a signed copy of the book to four readers of this blog.

Winning is easy. Just enter a comment on...

Addison Wesley informed me that theyve made a chapters available from my upcoming book, The Scrum Field Guide: Practical Advice for Your First Year. It includes the forwards by Jeff Sutherland and Jim Highsmith as well as Chapter 27, Documentation...

Jim was working as the business manager inside the company. He had years of experience and was a few years from retiring. Jim was working on a project with Michelle and he had been voluntold (told he would volunteer) that he was the teams product...

People often ask why they should work on a Scrum team if their companies base rewards on individual efforts. This raises the question, how does Scrum help the individual?

Many people ask me about team spaces and how to set them up. Not long ago, colleagues Ade Miller and Ajoy Krishnamoorthy did a walkthrough of the Microsoft patterns & practices space - it is built around agile teams. When watching this video,...