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From Manipulation to Sabotage: Recognizing and Addressing Toxicity
Dysfunctional (or toxic) employee behaviour poses a significant threat to productivity, organizational culture, and team effectiveness. This behaviour can take bizarre forms, ranging from manipulative negativity to outright discrediting of colleagues and evasion of professional responsibility. Such patterns create a detrimental working atmosphere. This leads to a decline in the team’s morale with cumulative effects…
What Should a Scrum Team Do with Undone Work Items at the End of a Sprint?
It seems that the Scrum Guide provides a clear answer to this question. All unfinished work at the end of a Sprint should be returned to the Product Backlog. It appears this could conclude the discussion. But why do I find myself repeatedly explaining to teams how to handle unfinished tasks in Scrum? Let’s explore…
Between Just Scrum and SAFe Scrum: Product Owner role
On the team level in SAFe, the same role names are used as in Scrum. This creates some confusion. Until the version SAFe 6.0, the process inside the team was called Scrum XP, and now it’s called SAFe Scrum. Both of these names suggest a kind of continuity, but one should not expect a perfect…
Embracing DORA Metrics
Embracing DORA Metrics Many companies have successfully integrated DevOps practices into their engineering processes. In these organizations, teams are accountable not only for software development but also for how these applications are deployed and maintained. This embodies the DevOps principle of “You build it — you own it.” Understanding DORA Metrics The DevOps Research and…
The Significance of the Sprint Goal in Scrum: Focusing on Value and Avoiding Pitfalls
In Scrum, the Sprint Goal plays a pivotal role in providing direction and purpose to the development team’s work during a sprint. It aligns the team’s efforts towards a specific objective and guides their decision-making and prioritization. While the importance of the Sprint Goal is widely recognized, there are instances where teams may overlook its…
An Optimal Sprint Length Selection as a Never Ending Story
Ah, the eternal question in the world of Scrum and other Agile methodologies – what should be the perfect duration for a sprint? You’d think with so many experienced teams out there, this question would have a clear-cut answer by now, but nope, it remains a mystery wrapped in an enigma. It’s almost as if…
What’s Wrong With a Typical Agile Team Explanation
Many articles and training courses on Agile often use an image or video of a racing team’s pit stop as an example of effective teamwork. In a matter of seconds, a team of mechanics swiftly changes a race car tires. This procedure, known as a pit stop, seems to perfectly illustrate an Agile team’s work…
Velocity and Capacity in Scrum
Velocity and capacity are important metrics in Agile project management, particularly in Scrum. They provide insights into a team’s productivity and help with planning and forecasting. However, when it comes to a new Scrum team, calculating velocity can be challenging since there is no historical data to base it on. In this article, we will…
We Are Tired of Meetings
This is the second part of the story about the role of meetings in agile approaches. In the previous part, we mainly talked with management about value delivery and its prevalence over utilization. We discussed the importance of self-assessment by regularly asking the question, “Is the thing we are currently doing the most important and…
