Here’s a Chinese translation of my book Scrum and XP from the Trenches. Thanks Jacky Li! A Spanish and Japanese version of the book is also available. Korean, Portuguese, German, 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

When talking about Scrum to business people I very often get the question "How do I deal with fixed priced contracts when doing Scrum?"

It struck me today no one who ever asked me this, has come to the conclusion that doing fixed priced contracts could be wrong way to go altogether.

And that is a bit scary.

Here’s a draft version of the Spanish translation of my book Scrum and XP from the Trenches. Good work Ángel Medinilla! Chinese, Korean, German, and Japanese translations are underway, I’ll let you know when they are done. UPDATE (June 10): Within 1 day of publishing this blog entry I received an offer to translate the

Here are top three tools for any Scrum project

Here are the slides from my session "10 ways to screw up with Scrum and XP", from the JavaForum conference in Malmö. I’ve done this session at other conferences, but updated the slides a little bit each time. Interesting that so many people like to hear about how to get it all wrong :o)

In Scrum it is often perceived that planning takes place on sprint planning day. Getting the required parties in the same place and do planning is a good way of making real time decisions. But getting people together is a dounting or impossible task and this also neglects some of the thought processes that needs to take place before stories are estimatable.

Here’s a paper describing a strategy for version control with multiple teams in an agile environment. It is hosted on InfoQ. Enjoy! Online version (best for reading read on screen) PDF version (best for printing) Single-page summary in print-friendly format.

Because of unclear definition of benefit of removing technical debt, PO and teams risk move into a standstill regarding activities to to remove it. This is counter productive, we should remove thresholds of quality improvement activities, not introduce them. So let’s look into a simple definition that can help out.

As a Scrum team, we need to recognise that we are not alone in building business value for our software and provide visibility in where we are heading. By using a roadmap updated per sprint basis is an easy way of making everyone pull in the same direction.

NOTE – this checklist is deprecated. The latest version is here.

Here’s a first draft of a simple checklist for those of you that are doing Scrum (or believe so…).

Here are the slides from my session "10 ways to screw up with Scrum and XP", from the JFokus conference in Stockholm.

Many companies with existing legacy code bases bump into a huge impediment when they want to get agile: lack of test automation.

This article illustrates how to address this problem by creating a test automation backlog and implementing a few tests each sprint.

As I mentioned in Failing with Scrum, Scrum is no silver bullet. It doesn’t guarantee success, but it improves the odds.

Over the past few years I’ve been involved in dozens of Scrum projects, directly or indirectly. Interestingly enough, every single case that I can remember has been successful (maybe I just have selective memory…)! The client has been happy with the process and wants to continue using Scrum in future projects.

Here are some thoughts and conclusions about that.

There are plenty of Scrum success stories out there, but not so many failure stories. That gives rise to a healthy scepticism. Where are the failure stories? Obviously there must be failures! Or?

Here’s a "failure" story and some thoughts on what it means to fail with Scrum.

I’ve spent quite a lot of time helping gaming companies get agile over the past few years. This article on Scrum and long term planning for video games has some really nice insights and reflections on this! A good summary of some of the industry-specific issues, and patterns for how to address these issues. Recommended

Many people use a spreadsheet to house their Scrum Product Backlog. That works quite fine. However, during sprint planning meetings it is usually much more effective to use physical index cards. See my book Scrum and XP from the Trenches for the reasoning behind this. Here’s a simple tool that generates printable index cards in

Scrum and XP from the Trenches is now listed on Amazon.com. (as well as on InfoQ). If you liked the book then go submit a review on Amazon :o)

Cool, I was awarded Best Speaker at the Bits & Chips conference in The Netherlands :o) Never would have expected that, considering there were more than 50 other speakers! I did a brief talk about "Bootstrapping Scrum and XP", with an audience of about 150 people. Decided to open with 15 minutes of  "The fastest

Here are the slides from my Scrum Gathering presentation “The Managers Role In Scrum“. The pictures will make most sense if you were at the presentation :o) Slides in powerpoint format Slides in PDF format

An agile coach should never leave home without his Agile Toolkit! Mine is much sloppier. The pretty one above belongs to my co-coach David Barnholdt.

To those of you that were at my presentation at JavaForum today, here are the slides for Scrum – what’s in it for me (in Swedish). Enjoy!

Here are the slides for my presentation 10 ways to screw up with Scrum and XP. The slides are (as usual) mostly pictures and few words so they may be a bit confusing if you weren’t at the presentation :o)

Most people in the industry seem to agree that Scrum and XP complement each other.

2nd Annual State of Agile Development Survey shows the following statistics for Scrum & XP adoption:

• Scrum: 37%
• Scrum + XP: 23%
• XP: 12%

   Now you can finally order planning poker decks from our site :o)

For those of you who attended my Scrum & XP tutorial at the JAOO conference, here are the slides: http://www.crisp.se/henrik.kniberg/presentations/JAOO-2007-Henrik-Kniberg.pdf Thanks for attending, hope you had a good time! Despite my piano playing (how can I resist a grand piano standing in the corner of the room :o) I thought the attendance would be like

Doesn’t the world need another modelling language? :o)

ScruML stands for "Scrum Modelling Language". Like UML, but domain specific and not as strict and… um… well maybe not that much like UML after all.

Read on for more….

Scrum and XP from the Trenches is now available on InfoQ, with forwards by Mike Cohn and Jeff Sutherland :o) The printed version costs $22.95, the online version is free but requires registration on InfoQ. My older PDF version is hereby deprecated, so if you have any links please update to the InfoQ version! http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/scrum-xp-from-the-trenches

I’ve written up a page with a pretty graphical summary of what Planning Poker is. http://www.crisp.se/planningpoker/

Även om en del Crispare var tidigt ute med Scrum, framför allt Henrik Kniberg, så var jag själv initialt skeptisk. Efter Henrik bestämde sig fyra andra Crispare (Jan Grape, Mats Strandberg, Magnus Axelqvist och Hans Brattberg) att gå certifieringskursen i Uppsala för ett år sedan. Jag tackade nej med motiveringen att "Scrum känns som en

For those of you that do Scrum, here’s a simple tool that generates printable index cards in A5 format directly from your Excel-based product backlog.