Lately, I’ve seen a lot of people and teams that experience ‘agile’ and ‘scrum’ as instrumental and full of rules and restrictions. Leading to results that are not getting the teams in the direction that are intended and giving an experience that is kind of reaching the opposite of what agile frameworks set out to do. I firmly believe that Scrum Masters – and any kind of coaches for that matter – need to focus and turn the attention of their efforts back on the empiricism: making sense of ‘agile’ by experimenting, learning and giving and receiving feedback constantly.

Mob programming .. really ? Where does that name come from?

Thinking of an angry mob couldn’t be more counterintuitive of what you would want from a successful programming session. Mobs are disorganised, prone to rash decisions, angry and unwilling to compromise. Mob programming however is none of these things.

Experiences with teams without coding capacity: there should be focus on the end-2-end product

Lately I’ve experienced working with Scrum Teams without coding capacity. My main conclusions:

1) principles and values of agility can certainly improve these teams and make them more effective, but without considering the end-2-end product the overall organizational agility will not increase. My second conclusion is that

Object of Play

Some teams are struggling with re-enforcing behaviors and can’t seem to find why they can’t find the cause. If teams seem unable to reach the goal for their iteration, it’s good to go hunting for root causes.  The 5 why’s technique was formally developed in the 1930s by Sakichi Toyoda, one of the fathers of the Japanese industrial revolution. Here is a new take in combination with Liberating Structures that addresses some of the 5 why’s criticisms.

Purposes :