Scrum: The Obsession with Commitment Matching Velocity

TL; DR: The Obsession with Commitment Matching Velocity

Despite decades-long efforts of the whole agile community—books, blogs, conferences, webinars, videos, meetups; you name it—we are still confronted in many supposedly agile organizations with output-metric driven reporting systems. At the heart of these reporting systems, stuck in the industrial age when the management believed it needed to protect the organization from slacking workers, there is typically a performance metric: velocity.

In the hands of an experienced team, velocity might be useful a team-internal metric. But, when combined with some managers’ wrong interpretation of commitment, it becomes a tool of oppression. So when did it all go so wrong?

Scrum: The Obsession with Commitment Matching Velocity — Age-of-Product.com
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How to Win with Agile Resistant Teams — Scott Weiner at the Agile Camp Berlin 2021

TL; DR: How to Win with Agile Resistant Teams w/ Scott Weiner — ACB21

In this highly engaging speaker session from the Agile Camp Berlin 2021, Scott Weiner shares a case study on how to master an agile transition by creating agile resistant teams based on common sense, team autonomy, and the psychology of metrics.

How to Win with Agile Resistant Teams w/ Scott Weiner — Agile Camp Berlin 2021
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Data-Informed Retrospectives

TL; DR: Data-Informed Retrospectives

In their book Agile Retrospectives, Esther Derby and Diana Larsen popularized the idea that a Sprint Retrospect comprises five stages. The second stage refers to gathering data so that the Scrum Team can have data-informed Retrospectives.

As I have observed in practice, many Scrum Teams either limit the data gathering part of the Retrospective, thus lacking vital information. Or they invest too much time doing so, leaving little capacity to analyze the data and come to conclusions on how to best improve as a team.

Read on and learn how you can avoid falling victim to both scenarios by gathering data continuously and asynchronously.

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70 Scrum Master Theses

TL; DR: The Scrum Master Theses

The following 70 Scrum Master theses describe the role of a holistic product creation perspective.

The theses cover the accountabilities of the Scrum Master from product discovery to product delivery in a hands-on practical manner. On the one side, they address typical Scrum events such as Sprint Planning, Sprint Review, and the Sprint Retrospective. On the other hand, the Scrum Master theses also cover, for example, the relationship with the Product Owner, they deal with agile metrics, and how to kick-off an agile transition, thus moving beyond the original framework of the Scrum Guide.

70 Scrum Master Theses — Age-of-Product.com
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Agile Metrics — The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

TL; DR: Agile Metrics

Suitable agile metrics reflect either a team’s progress in becoming agile or your organization’s progress in becoming a learning organization.

At the team level, qualitative agile metrics often work better than quantitative metrics. At the organizational level, this is reversed: quantitative agile metrics provide better insights than qualitative ones.

Agile Metrics — Age-of-Product.com
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Agile Metrics Survey 2020

TL; DR: The Agile Metrics Survey 2020

Let’s stop guessing and start crowdsourcing data and information on this critical topic: Who is using what metrics under which context to what success? Participate in the agile metrics survey now.

Update 2020-12-14: We have joined forces with empiriks.de, a German consultancy specializing in statistical analysis, and we plan to take the study to the next level. The Agile Metrics Survey already complies with academic standards. However, what we need now is more participants to improve the sample size.

So far, we have more than 750 contributors; let’s strive for 1,000 contributions by the end of January 2021 and aim to publish the report by the end of March 2021!

👉 🔬 Start your contribution now!

Agile Metrics Survey 2020 — Age-of-Product.com
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