CollabNet Scrum and Agile Blog

Some late breaking events caused several students in a recent Certified Scrum Product Owner class to reschedule, leaving only five students in the class. I (Lyssa) had arranged for a candidate Certified Scrum Trainer (CST), Brian Rabon, to co-teach with me in this class.  He and I had some fancy footwork to do as many [...]

Below is an excerpt from an email response I sent someone asking me about Kanban and Scrum and what they should do to determine which is more appropriate for their teams. This is just my personal opinion on this subject and I’m sure our trainers have MUCH better perspective to add!
Kanban for software is an [...]

Thanks to a ton of help from Michael James, I just put the finishing touches on my new webinar, “Necessary conditions for enterprise agile success: The subtle stuff you’re probably getting wrong.” In this presentation, I plan to review the common mistakes and pitfalls I witness at organizations around the world who have tried to [...]

Like many Scrum trainers, I use the Ball Point Game in my Certified ScrumMaster course. We do it fairly early on, in the first hour, before we’ve gotten know each other. I use the Ball Point Game to show teams that they in fact already know how to do Scrum, meaning they know [...]

In the first installment of this blog series on How To Have An Effective Daily Scrum (“When The Daily Scrum Isn’t Daily” posted April 30, 2010 ) I reviewed the purpose and some good practices for effective daily scrum meetings. We also examined the first in a series of “smells” that can contribute to your [...]

This year, I encountered my first classroom-full of people who had never worked waterfall. Now, I don’t talk a lot about waterfall versus Scrum when I teach the Certified ScrumMaster course, just enough to set the stage for why Scrum arose when it did. I show some data about the appalling failure rates [...]

The daily scrum is one of the most valuable practices that any team can use. Teams that are new to Scrum, particularly teams that are transitioning from a more traditional project management methodology can fall victim to less than stellar habits in their daily Scrum meeting.  The value that should have been derived from this [...]

As part of any good acquisition it was our job (as Executives) to evaluate what we brought to the table and position the companies (CollabNet and Danube) as one. CollabNet, as everyone on the planet knows, is Subversion.

Common challenges often laid at the doorstep of upper management as an organization starts to see the benefits of Scrum are a noisy host of problems that usher in the need for a trio of mind-set changes: resource utilization vs. throughput, competition vs. collaboration and command-and-control vs. servant leadership. In my experience, most of [...]

When we’re anxious about the way things are going, we have an urge to do something.  Doing things makes us feel like we’re helping, reducing our anxiety.  This is part of being human, and usually it’s beneficial.
Sometimes this urge compels us to interfere with natural processes working the best they’re going to.  Why have we [...]