As an Agile/Scrum coach I value commitment from the team at the top of my requirement or wish lists, even higher than Kaizen (Continuous Improvement).

So why is this so important?

Cross-functional team doesn’t mean everybody has to know everything – this seems to be a common misinterpretation though. Cross-functional just means that the team as a whole has all skills needed to build the product, and that each team member is willing to do more than just their own thing. Are you unsure if your

Alexey Kritivitsky (Ukraine Agile community) has created a fun Scrum training exercise new teams using Lego.

Since games is such a brilliant teaching tool, you should know about it 🙂
http://tinyurl.com/legoscrum

Vad borde ScrumMaster heta på svenska, och varför heter det ScrumMaster och inte Scrum Master på engelska?

Enligt en anekdot jag hört så var ursprungsnamnet Scrum Slave, men Ken Schwaber och Jeff Sutherland insåg tidigt att det inte skulle vara så säljande. 🙂

How can anyone say

that they are Lean or agile when they don’t inspect and adapt.

What most companies have in common when they implement process improvement is lack of continuous improvement…..  

I have for some time been thinking, what is best, Kanban or Scrum. I can’t make up my mind so I decided to write two blog entries, one where I have the "I love Kanban" hat on me and one where I’m wearing a "I love Scrum" T-shirt. My conclusion is, not very suprisingly, that  it depends on the situation.

In this entry I take the Scrum T-shirt on.

I have for some time been thinking, what is best, Kanban or Scrum. I can’t make up my mind so I decided to write two blog entries, one where I have the "I love Kanban" hat on me and one where I’m wearing a "I love Scrum" T-shirt. My conclusion is, not very surprisingly, that  it depends on the situation.

In this entry I take the Kanban hat on.

Here’s a great list of agile tools on Mike Cohn’s User Stories site! Primarily for product backlog and user story management. Only problem is that there are way too few reviews so far. Are you using an agile tool? Go submit a review now and spread the link to your friends! Let’s help build this

(sorry, this article is in Swedish, because it is a response to a Swedish article. I won’t make this a habit.)

I en artikel i Computer Sweden den 3 feb står det ”siffror visar att nio av tio Scrumprojekt misslyckas”. Men de angivna siffrorna handlar i själva verket om något helt annat – att 9 av 10 personer som säger att de kör Scrum inte implementerar Scrum fullt ut. Detta säger ingenting om huruvida själva projektet lyckades eller inte (eftersom Scrum inte är ett självandamål). Denna typ av sensationsjournalistik gynnar ingen – utom möjligen tidningen som vill öka sina tittarsiffror, men på bekostnad av trovärdighet.

Låt oss därför titta på lite mer relevanta siffror istället….

I recently got  a valid question from a collegue and it deserves an answer.
"When do I use Scrum and when do I use Lean?"

Lean predicts that work happens in a certain order. Scrum has a "chaos" approach where work can be done in best possible way, dictated by the situation.

Therefore Scrum works better than Lean in environments with rapid change, on the edge of chaos where the same solution rarely work twice.

A Russian translation of my book Scrum and XP from the Trenches is now available. Thanks Aleksey Solntsev for initiating this project, and thanks to all of the 17 people who contributed (listed on the first page in the book). French, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and Portuguese translations are also available. Korean, German, Italian, and Slovak

1-2 days every week I schedule “slack” days, where I try to catch up on emails, do some admin, prepare for future engagements, and such. During the past year I’ve been using the Pomodoro technique more and more consistently and, the more I use it, the more I find that it really works well! It

I often hear from Scrum teams they don’t understand why estimating in story points are better than estimating in ideal man days. Here comes three reasons …

A French translation of my book Scrum and XP from the Trenches is now available. Big thanks to Guillaume Mathias, Bruno Orsier, Emmanuel Etasse, and Christophe Bunn. Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and Portuguese translations are also available. Korean, German, and Slovak translations are underway. I never cease to be impressed by the agile community! All translations

A Portuguese translation of my book Scrum and XP from the Trenches is now up on the Brazilian InfoQ site. Big thanks to Renato Willi for initiating and coordinating this effort, and thanks to all the other 30 contributors as well who made this happen (listed at the end of the book)! Spanish, Japanese, and

Here are the slides from my session "Multi-team sprint planning" from Scrum Gathering 2008 in Stockholm. Here is all the other material from the Scrum Gathering. Interesting stuff!

Here are the slides from my session "Bootstrapping Scrum – Lessons learned helping companies get started" from Scrum Gathering 2008 in Stockholm. I used the same slides at the Scan-Agile conference in Helsinki Oct 29. Here is all the other material from the Scrum Gathering. Interesting stuff!

Have you experienced a burndown similar to this?

More than once?

Let me show how Kanban can help both team and managers to spot the underlying  problem before it is too late.

Yesterday I was at the "Agile i Sverige" conference in Stockholm and did a keynote called "Lita på mig – löften och lögner i agila project". In English that would be "Trust me – promises and lies in agile projects". Here are the slides. The slides are in Swedish (although I ended up doing the

Scrum received some criticism today in Computer Sweden. The article featured an interview of Ken Schwaber and our guy Henrik Kniberg. Tobias Fors from Citerus was giving the comment that Scrum lacked support for retrospective. I am not sure if he was quoted correctly.

I am in the belief that Scrum has three roles, three artefacts and three meetings. Of the latter, there is one you should never skip.

Here are the slides from my session Multi-team sprint planning. The session took place at the Scrum Forum meeting in Aarhus on Oct 1, in conjunction with the JAOO 2008 conference.

"Simple" is a word often used in agile software development. Terms like YAGNI and "do the simplest thing that can possibly work". It is easy to forget, however, that Simple is often Hard! So what’s hard about becoming an agile software developer, where are the bumps in the ride? In this talk I went through

Not all impediments are easily fixed. They can be structural by nature. Lack of space, bad air or organization legacy is not always an easy fix. So what to do? Do you:

Keep impediments on the daily impediment list (with potential demoralising effect of seeing it every day)? Assign a person and remove it from the list? Or..?

This article on DN (major Swedish newspaper) caught my attention this morning:

The title of the article is "Waiting times at Huddinge halved with new process".

We spend a lot of time helping IT companies understand how to use Lean principles to increase the speed and quality of their product development. It’s interesting to see how the same techniques are applied in totally different domains – in this case the intensive care unit at a hospital.

Here is InfoQ’s video recording of my 90 minute session "10 ways to Screw up with Scrum and XP" at Agile 2008 in Toronto. And here are the slides too. Too bad the slide animations and the audience participation doesn’t show up, and that you mostly see the back of my head (the camera was

Here are the slides from my session "Bootstrapping Scrum and XP in a crisis" at Agile 2008 in Toronto.

Here are the slides from my session “Technical Debt – how not to ignore it” at Agile 2008 in Toronto. Translations: Portuguese (thanks Demetrius Nunes)

Here are the slides from my session “10 ways to screw up with Scrum and XP” at Agile 2008 in Toronto. Glad that so many of you participated :o) Translations: Brazilian Portuguese (thanks Demetrius Nunes)

If you’re in Stockholm Sep 25-26 you might be interested in Deep Lean. It’s a 2 day in-depth course on Lean & Agile & Scrum (see the course agenda). The teachers are Mary and Tom Poppendieck, Jeff Sutherland, and myself. Mary and Tom coined the term Lean Software Development and Jeff invented Scrum (the most

Here’s a Japanese translation of my book Scrum and XP from the Trenches. Thanks Shoichi Goto! A Spanish version of the book is also available. Korean, Portuguese, German, Chinese, French, and Slovak translations are underway. I’m impressed by the agile community! All translations will soon be listed on InfoQ. Feel free to email me (henrik.kniberg