Blog Archives

Become a great team member

Sometime ago came across “7 Ways to Boost Your Ability as a Scrum Team Member”.

Caught my eye because, well, you know, I like “boost”, have been and are a Scrum Team Member, 7 is a nice number, and I love tips and tricks to improve my ability at anything.

Read more ›




Ditch those retrospective action lists

Retrospective action list

You have just completed a sprint and are on your way to the retrospective. In a flash you remember you all agreed to do something about X. The mail from the Scrum Master with the retro’s action list, still sits in your inbox.

Sound familiar?

Read more ›




Stop reporting to the scrum master

Reminder dialog

“Beep. Beep. Beep.” A reminder dialog raises its head in the bottom left corner of your screen. Daily Scrum in 5 minutes.

Your shoulders tense in weary anticipation. It all sounded so good when you all started on the journey to become more agile.

Read more ›




Current Scrum Master training and certification lead to zombie teams

Disenchantment

You see a lot of people getting disenchanted with agile. Because the transition hasn’t brought the benefits agile proponents promised. You also see a lot of moans about “management” that thinks they can bring in some change managers or agile coaches and “be agile” in two months.

There are plenty of articles on the web bemoaning the “Death of Agile”.

Read more ›




Google is your friend, but…

Still grinning with what happened a few minutes ago.

After replyting to Warren Postma’s comment on my “Like it or not, humans are emotional beings, and yes that includes males” post, I wondered whether he would see my reply.

WordPress does offer a “Notify me of follow-up comments via email”

Read more ›




Like it or not, humans are emotional beings, and yes that includes males

Being in software development means chances are you are male. Males supposedly are a lot less emotional then females. So, me being female, it stands to reason that I am more emotional than my colleagues?

Ha! Fat chance.

Well, okay, nowadays maybe. Helped along by the hormonal changes that come with my age.

Read more ›




Self-organization doesn’t happen by itself

Have you ever been told: “We are going to be agile. And we’ll follow SCRUM from now on.”? Maybe you have been lucky and had a day’s worth of training on the SCRUM framework. So you know that SCRUM teams are self-organizing and nobody tells them how to do their work,

Read more ›




Don’t use your backlog as a souvenir cabinet

On one of my online information hikes recently, I came across this question: Is backlog refinement (grooming) waste?.

Summarizing and paraphrasing, the question asks whether backlog refinement should be abandoned in favor of practices that prevent the backlog growing to a size where refinement would be needed.

Read more ›




Trust is not all or nothing

Have you ever been asked whether you trust the people you work with? Your peers? The people that work under your guidance or direction? The people that guide or direct you?

What was your answer?

My bet is that even if you silently thought “no”, you probably answered “yes”.

Read more ›




“Trust has to be earned” is counterproductive

Last Friday I was at an open space agile conference. Surrounded by Agile Coaches. People doing what I am learning about and practicing for. People responsible for helping agile teams improve.

To help anyone improve means getting them to open up. Not just about anything. About their failures.

Read more ›




Show Buttons
Hide Buttons