Is there any particular background that makes a successful Scrum Master? 10 most common Scrum Master backgrounds & 5 pt Effective Scrum Master Checklist
Who can become a Scrum Master?
7 Tips for Writing Acceptance Criteria with Examples
Acceptance Criteria Definition Acceptance Criteria defines how a particular feature could be used from an end user’s perspective. It focuses on business value, establishes the boundary of the feature’s scope and guides development. These are unique to a user story and form the basis of user story acceptance testing which establishes the conditions for the success of the feature. Acceptance criteria could establish a boundary that helps team members to understand what’s included and what’s excluded from the scope of the user story. The criterion of user story acceptance not only informs the product behavior in happy path scenarios, it also guides...
Scrum Master Focus Survey
The survey aims to compare the Scrum Master's role as described in the Scrum Guide with the reality in organizations. With that aim, I'm set out to collect the real world insights from practicing Scrum Masters, about the Scrum Master role and the focus of Scrum Masters. If you are currently performing the Scrum Master role, please answer this survey to maintain a high relevance of the answers collected. We value candid answers based on real world facts over answers based on future aspirations or...
What is a Scrum Master, How to Become a Certified ScrumMaster?
What is a Scrum Master? Scrum Master is one of the three roles that make up the Scrum Team as described by the Scrum Framework. The Scrum Master role is specific to Scrum and is a critical aspect in achieving the ambitious goals of helping the team and the organization be adaptable to rapidly changing customer needs through continuous inspect and adapt. To be adaptable the organization must develop the capability to continuously seek feedback from the customers about their needs and adapt their approach to meet these needs gracefully. The Scrum Master acts as a catalyst to this capability development within the team and the organization. Scrum Master achieves this by...
Living without TechDebt
I grew up in an educated middle-class family and was taught to #Save rather accrue #Debt. I don’t remember my family applying for a loan to buy an expensive house hold appliance or to go for a luxury vacation abroad. I guess most parents teach their kids to manage their spending and live within means. I saw my parents live debt free. That encouraged me to think what was really important to buy. It forced me to make sound choices. The need to live without debt taught me to say No. No to unwanted stuff. No to things that were not urgent. No to things that were appealing on the surface but didn’t fit into the bigger scheme of my world. If you’ve read...
Hiring an Agile Coach
If you’re a leader of product development and/or delivery, you would’ve found self hunting for an Agile Coach at some point of time. Hiring an Agile Coach to help your product development teams becomes a natural step in mid to large size organizations, after you’ve trained your people and they’ve been breaking their head for sometime – trying to solve the How to Become Agile puzzle on their own. I can share a list of 20 things to look for when hiring an Agile Coach, however, I’ll be generous and I’ll only share with you my top two. Why only two?, you ask. Well, Agile Coaches can come from a wide variety of backgrounds and can...
Does your Scrum Master Inspect and Adapt?
The empirical approach to product development doesn't have to be limited to the fine tuning the product direction, it's equally powerful when applied to the process of developing the product. Sprint Retrospective meeting provides an in-built approach for the Scrum Teams to inspect and adapt. I observe in most organizations (almost 9 out of 10 times), everyone in organization is looking up to the development team to retrospect and improve their process. Most of the time the implicit desire is for the development team to deliver more features in less time. What is almost always overlooked is if the Scrum Master is performing her job effectively in helping the Scrum Team...
5 Key Lessons for Product Based Enterprises from Army
In September 2016 Indian special forces carried out surgical strikes at 7 terrorist launch pads across the line of control (LOC) in POK. Read more…. Surgical strikes require detailed and exhaustive planning. It needs to be carried out with absolute precision to achieve the objective of taking down targets with either no or minimal collateral damage. In an ideal world, there shouldn’t be a need for such operations as everyone should aim to live peacefully and let others live peacefully. No terrorism, no surgical strikes. However the reality today is far from ideal. There are many pearls of strategy from this surgical strike that corporations can learn and get...
Six powerful hacks for Scrum Masters to Gain Influence without Authority
As a Scrum Master you have one of the toughest yet incredibly meaningful role to play in improving the product development environment in organizations. You don’t have any positional power and authority in the organization, as none of the development team members report in to you. Despite lack of authority and power, your role is highly dependent on enormous amount of influence to be able to educate and coach the development team, the product owner and the organization at large. High level of influence helps you become effective in delivering your responsibilities. The lack of enough influence, could cause the Scrum Master to quickly succumb to an administrative...
The Product Owner Puzzle
A dedicated and effective Product Owner is critical for a Scrum Team to deliver exceptionally successful products that delight customers, gains market share and yields high ROI for the organization. Jenny is a director of product development at a global organization that is in the midst of a massive transformation. The market they operate in, is evolving rapidly, the customer needs they specialize in serving well are fast changing and the way they organize and run the enterprise must adapt to demands of the newer generation of knowledge workers. Jenny is smart and thoughtful leader. She is responsible to serve millions of users every day via a portfolio of web and...
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