Category Archives: Scrum Intro

What is Scrum? – by Ken Schwaber

Here is a short paper by Ken Schwaber: whatIsScrum Willem-Jan Ageling (here) says that the paper is from 2003.  So, about 10 years after Scrum was invented. Schwaber and Sutherland (and others) had written many papers by then.  And the Scrum Guide (of 2009) had not yet been written. It is interesting to see the […]

Webinar: Scrum Basics

We have a free webinar about Scrum Basics, to provide you information and to take your questions. *** This webinar is a bit about Agile, but mostly about the basics of Scrum, in 60 minutes. We have another webinar the introduces our CSM course, which gives you the basics in 16 hours.   Still, basic, but […]

The Impediment List

The most important thing a ScrumMaster does is remove impediments. This is easy to say, since anything that needs to be fixed or changed we define as an impediment. What is an Impediment? So, just about anything can be an impediment. So, how do we define an impediment?  One way: Anything that is slowing down […]

Working Product and the DOD

This is one in a series on Scrum Intro. The preceding post is here. Now we come to the Working Product. The big phrase is “potentially shippable product increment.” What it means is first this: At the end of a Sprint, we expect every story that the team committed to in the Sprint Planning Meeting is […]

The Release Burndown Chart

This is one in a series on Scrum Intro. The preceding post is here. Now we come to the release burndown chart. What is the idea? The first idea is that we want to hit the date. But let’s agree that things can be a bit more complex. Side notes: There are many different kinds of […]

The Sprint Burndown Chart

This is one in a series on Scrum Intro. The preceding post is here. Now we come to the Burn Down charts. You could start with either one, but let’s start with the Sprint Burndown chart. We might first note that the Scrum Guide does not talk about a (Sprint) Burndown chart.  There is a […]

The Sprint Backlog

This is one in a series on Scrum Intro. The preceding post is here. This artifact is different than many suppose. It is the list of stories and the list of tasks for those stories, that the Team thinks they can get done in a Sprint. (In my mind, the normal sprint should be 2 […]

The Product Backlog

This is one in a series on Scrum Intro. The preceding post is here. Intro The Product Backlog is usually the first mentioned of the artifacts. In some sense, Scrum starts with the Product Backlog, or at least the first Sprint cannot start without a Product Backlog. The Product Backlog is a list of all […]

The Artifacts

Note: This is one in a continuing series of posts re Scrum Intro. The preceding post is here. Now we turn to the artifacts in Scrum. First we have to be clear: There can be many many artifacts for a team depending on the work and how you define artifact. So, the main artifacts we […]

The Retrospective

Note: This post is one of a continuing series re Scrum Intro. The preceding post is here. Basics We usually think of the Retrospective as the last meeting of the Sprint. But what is the difference between the Sprint Review and the Retrospective? The Sprint Review is about the product. The Retrospective is about the process, […]