The Mountain Goat Software Blog

Even Scrum Masters need a holiday every now and then. Here are four things for a Scrum Master to consider doing for the team before leaving on a vacation.

A typical career path for a Scrum Master will start with serving one team. After a while that team becomes less time-consuming to work with, as issues are resolved and the team takes on more responsibilities itself.

Over time, Scrum teams take on some of the Scrum Master duties themselves. Does the self-organizing nature of Scrum teams mean they eventually do away with the need for a Scrum Master?

A micromanaging boss or stakeholder inhibits agility. The three questions in this article can help prevent management.

Incentives and bonuses can be used to reward agile teams but must be aligned with agile principles. Here are some tips on how to do that.

Advice on scaling agile projects by adding a chief product owner and sharing responsibility across a product owner team.

When one person cannot attend one of Scrum’s meetings, the best thing is almost always to conduct the meeting anyway. But there are important exceptions.

Some teams use the sprint review as a time for product owners or key stakeholders to formally approve the product backlog items completed during the sprint. Is this a good idea?

In this agile principles post from Mike Cohn, discover how Scrum organizations define products. Learn why good product definition avoids problems related to agile team structure, product backlog management, and Scrum roles.

You have undoubtedly had team members complain at some point about the length of your daily scrums. Join the club. I want to share two extremely simple things you can do to put an end to most of those complaints. (I can’t promise getting rid of all complaints—some people will always complain.)

I recently emailed everyone who subscribes to my weekly tips a list of suggestions for ways to motivate team members to arrive on time to the daily scrum. For example, many teams have a rule that if you arrive late, you put a dollar in a jar as punishment for being late. Ideally the collected money is donated to a charity at the end of a project or after it reaches a certain amount.

Planning Poker relies on relative estimating, in which the item being estimated is compared to one or more previously estimated items. It is the ratio between items that is important. An item estimated as 10 units of work (generally, story points) is estimated to take twice as long to complete as an item estimated as five units of work.