Road to PSMIII

Sjoerd Nijland has written a nice series of blogposts about his road to PSMIII:

Definition of Scrum
https://medium.com/serious-scrum/definition-of-scrum-2d1f224256c

Empiricism: Transparency
https://medium.com/serious-scrum/empiricism-transparency-33adad8fbba2

Empiricism: Inspection, Part One
https://medium.com/serious-scrum/empiricism-inspection-part-one-cc4cd8bf98a8

Empiricism: Inspection, Part Two
https://medium.com/serious-scrum/empiricism-inspection-part-two-fafb785bd0c0

Empiricism: Adaptation
https://medium.com/serious-scrum/empiricism-adaptation-975f044a09b2

Scrum Values
https://medium.com/serious-scrum/scrum-values-1203813e0220

The Scrum Team
https://medium.com/serious-scrum/the-scrum-team-75b8004a4bc2

The Scrum Master
https://medium.com/serious-scrum/the-scrum-master-729e223f4b64

The Scrum Master’s responsibilities
https://medium.com/serious-scrum/the-scrum-masters-responsibilities-7ee05cae707e

The Product Owner
https://medium.com/serious-scrum/the-product-owner-6b7a63fef8fe

The Development Team
https://medium.com/serious-scrum/the-development-team-575d69054a9b

The Sprint
https://medium.com/serious-scrum/the-sprint-40d0ccc895f9

Sprint Cancellation
https://medium.com/serious-scrum/sprint-cancellation-c9a9c66e8c99

Scrum’s Artifacts
https://medium.com/serious-scrum/scrums-artifacts-6f07abfab11

The Product Backlog
https://medium.com/serious-scrum/the-product-backlog-7aec7daf844f

Estimation
https://medium.com/serious-scrum/estimation-103de626551e

Asking the right questions; how to help a Scrum Team switch from a technical to a functional Backlog

One of the biggest challenges for a Scrum Team is to switch from a technical to a functional perspective on their work. Christiaan Verwijs has developed a set of helpful questions that often trigger teams into a functional frame of mind.

  • Why is it important that we implement this?
  • What problem of stakeholders and/or end-users do we solve by doing this?
  • What personas benefit from this, and why? (given that you have personas)
  • How would sales explain the benefits of this to customers and/or users
  • What reasons would an end-user have to want this?
  • How would you explain this to a colleague who is not part of this project?
  • How would you explain this to your spouse, at home, after a hard of work?
  • What would you show during the review to demonstrate that this is working?
  • If you are a user, how would you test if this works?
  • What changes would a user notice after implementing this?
  • What stakeholders benefit from this, and why?
  • If we wouldn’t do this, what would end-users and or customers miss or be unable to do?
  • What compliment would a happy user of customer give after delivering this?
  • How would you explain this to a potential end-user?
  • What steps would you go through in the application to test if this works?
  • If we’d put this in release notes that will be read by end-users, how would we announce it?

Read the original article here: https://medium.com/the-liberators/asking-the-right-questions-how-to-help-a-scrum-team-switch-from-a-technical-to-a-functional-bee6c1598487

A Day in the Life of a Scrum Master

In this blog post, Barry Overeem will share the most common question that gets asked during the Scrum.org Professional Scrum Master courses. He’ll focus on the Scrum Master role and will provide an answer based on his personal experience as a Scrum Master. This for sure isn’t the ultimate answer, it’s how he has fulfilled or experienced the situation himself; https://medium.com/the-liberators/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-scrum-master-1f0c31bc07c5

How to introduce myself as a Scrum Master in an existing team?

Some questions you could ask yourself are:

  • Does the team know Agile, the Scrum framework?
  • What is the composition of the team?
  • What motivates the members?
  • What are the common goals of the team?
  • How about the values of the team?
  • Is there a history that we need to know before joining the team?
  • Would you start with a kick off / retrospective where the team would explain their pains and where we could discuss way of working?

How to Deal with Bad Scrum User Stories as a ScrumMaster

It is common in the early stages of Scrum implementation for there to be misunderstandings about what User Stories are for and what makes them useful. A ScrumMaster’s task is to be able to help the Team and Product Owner when they are faced with ineffective User Stories as they go into Sprint Planning.

Read the complete article here: https://agilepainrelief.com/notesfromatooluser/2019/01/deal-with-bad-scrum-user-stories-as-a-scrummaster.html

My Reading Backlog

I saw some people sharing their reading backlog and thought it was a fun idea to write mine down as well. Looking back at 2018 I was quite surprised how much books I managed to read.

If you know some books I should add to my backlog, please let me know!

A small note: I have not prioritized my todo-list, whenever I finish a book I pick something from it I feel like reading at that moment and start.

Continue reading “My Reading Backlog”