A cautionary tale about leaders and leadership — When you work enough with teams, sooner or later you run into one that isn’t receptive to your guidance. They are not buying your ideas about Scrum, Agile, pair programming, or whatever you want to bring them. Scrum Masters, Product Owners, Agile Coaches, and other change agents often see themselves…

Scientific insights into what creates stress, and how motivation can buffer it. With 5 practical ways to reduce stress and increase motivation — How sustainable is your pace as a developer? This has always been a huge struggle for us and most of the teams we’ve been part of. We’ve often found ourselves working late into the night, or during weekends. Unfortunately, many developers and development teams still burn more hours than are…

Things to keep in mind when you create your own survey or questionnaire for your team or organization — Have you ever set up a survey to assess how people feel about something? Perhaps tried to assess maturity, experience, or growth? If so, this post is interesting for you. While tools like SurveyMonkey and Google Forms make it easy to set up a questionnaire, setting up a proper survey…

What science tells us about how work agreements create high-performing teams. And five practical areas to focus on. — A while ago I was taking a walk with my partner Lisanne. A noisy flock of geese flew overhead in a messy V formation. We laughed at the amount of noise they produced. It all looked very chaotic. Then another flock flew overhead. It was a similar number of birds…

An investigation of scientific research into what motivates teams, and how many of these insights informed the Scrum framework and other Agile methodologies — You can also listen to a podcast of this article When people first look at the Scrum framework, they often see the roles and the events first. They see only the structure of Scrum; who wears the hats and when. And that makes sense. We are still so embedded in…

The more ideas you read about, the better your code becomes — I love coding. Or rather, what coding allows me to create. What started out in GWBasic in my childhood evolved into .NET, Node.JS, and Angular these days. Writing code is deeply engrossing, provided that I’m able to find the right solution to the problems I’m attempting to solve. There are…

An exploration of scientific insights. And four practical tips to encourage cohesion and coherence in your team. — You can also listen to a podcast of this article. Do your Daily Scrums feel like a pointless ritual where everyone just lists what they’ve done yesterday, and what they do will do today? Does Sprint Planning feel like a waste of time because everyone only wants to know what…

You can also listen to a podcast of this episode. We recently discussed a case on our community Discord that concerned a team without proper Sprint Reviews, stakeholders, and increments. The first intuition of many Scrum Masters — including myself — was to host a Sprint Retrospective. But this leaves…

Why many Scrum teams struggle with continuous improvement, and how you can do better — Do your Sprint Retrospectives feel like a waste of time? Are members of your team wondering what the point is of talking about improvement when nothing ever happens? Are you struggling to improve with your team, even though the whiteboard, Mural, or desk is littered with stickies with improvement ideas…