Scrum Guide: A Sacred Text?

Scrum-Guide-A-Sacred-Text?

As practitioners, the Scrum Guide is an important document and embodies core shared values, aims, and language. With any important, foundational text, the question comes up: how should we relate to it? Specifically: should we view the Scrum Guide as something like a Sacred Text, or in some other way? By “Sacred Text,” we mean…

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Scrum Needs No Apologists

An apologist is defined as someone offering a defense of something controversial. Since its introduction and emergence as a framework within which a group of individuals can cohere and collaborate as a real Team and empirically apply the opening statement of the Agile Manifesto “we are uncovering better ways… ”; Scrum has attracted both detractors and the aforementioned apologists. I have just one question for the apologists, “Why?”

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Responsibility vs. Accountability

We believe an integral part of honing your mastery of  Scrum is exploring real world dialogue from the larger Scrum community. The following is an excerpt from an email discussion between a Scrum practitioner and our 3Back Senior Training Team.

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Product Owner Riddle

I posed the following Riddle to the Scrum Trainers, and got some interesting answers, so I thought I’d pose it to everybody, and see what you think. Based on the current Scrum Guide, which you can find here, the following ‘rules’ are all true: Every Scrum Team has a Product Owner, Each Product Backlog is…

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So What Is Technical Debt in Scrum Anyways?

Technical Debt is what makes code hard to work with. It is an invisible killer of software, and must be aggressively managed. In this post I define Technical Debt and describe some of the issues. In the past, I have stated that the ScrumMaster’s #1 issue on a Team is likely to be getting the Team to write Quality Code, which is code that the Team can change easily.

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What Do You Do When You Finish a Scrum Sprint Early?

One of the best things that can happen to a Scrum Team is that it finishes its work early in a Sprint. It amazes me that Teams are confused about what to do, but they are. So here goes… If the Team finishes early, it seems to me there are two choices: take a holiday, or do something new.

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Team Rhythms and Noise

Scrum makes an assumption that you have a dedicated team who can focus on something for a sustained period of time. Most highly cognitive products require sustained focus and a consistent team rhythm.

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