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...

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...

There is no one-size-fits-all, magic bullet for determining a sprint length that works well for every team. Originally, Scrum called for one-month sprints, but nowadays many teams have been successful with two-week or even one-week sprints.

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The most frequently asked question on any project might be, “When will you be done?” or “Will you have it all done by a certain date?” We all have experienced times when our projections have been way off and we’ve suffered as a result. Scrum promises a more adaptable planning scenario, one that allows for and indeed expects change. But does that promise mean that we don’t have toor can’tdo release planning any more?

The simple answer is no.

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...

Looking for ways to use agile practices at home? This blog post was written in 2006 but it still applies today. I've since expanded it to my other kids (we had more).