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For Scrum Masters
The following resources have been hand-picked to provide Scrum Masters with some of the better resources available to assist you in your role. Also for anyone interested in learning more about Agile, Scrum, Lean and related topics.
Scrum Case Studies
- Scrum Case Studies – lots of them
- LeSS Case Studies – some very impressive case studies of multi-team Scrum
- Agile Development Meets Cloud Computing for Extraordinary Results at Salesforce.com (PDF)
- Standford case study – Salesforce.com Transformation (PDF)
Being a ScrumMaster
- The 8 Stances of a Scrum Master – 2nd Edition by Barry Overeem
- The Great ScrumMaster book and blog posts by Zuzi Šochová
ScrumMaster vs Agile Coach
- Myth 8: The Scrum Master is a Junior Agile Coach by Barry Overeem
- Episode 1: Why do ScrumMasters feel pressure to be an agile coach? (22:00) with Tobias Mayer and Jem Djelal
Definition of Done
- Definition of Done: Why it matters – includes an insightful 2×2 diagram.
Sprint Retrospective
- Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great (book)
- Tasty Cupcakes
- Retrospectives: Using Future, Backwards (slides) – by Rowan
- Niko-Nike Calendar for team mood tracking
- Cat Shoe, Sic! from Bernd Schiffer (slide 11)
- Top Gear Cool Wall
- Project Retrospectives (book) – the original classic
Team Dynamics
- The Five Levels of Teams
- The Discipline of Teams – Harvard Business Review
- Why Teams Don’t Work – Diane Coutu interviewing Richard J. Hackman (R.I.P.)
- Patrick Lencioni – The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (video)
Decision Making Protocols
- Decision Making – Reinventing Organsations wiki (based on Integral Theory – especially Teal level)
Powerful Questions
- The Art of Powerful Questions: Catalyzing Insight, Innovation, and Action (PDF) by Eric E. Vogt, Juanita Brown, and David Isaacs
- Some Powerful Questions (PDF)
- 70 Awesome Coaching Questions Using the GROW Model
User Stories and Acceptance Criteria
- User Stories, Epics and Themes by Mike Cohn.
- Splitting User Stories by Richard Lawrence and Peter Green.
- On Acceptance Criteria for User Stories article by Sandy Mamoli.
- Two Examples of Splitting Epics by Mike Cohn – includes an example of building up a complex calculation algorithm incrementally.
- The Art of Splitting Features and Epics into Playable Stories by Tarang Baxi (53:50) – case studies of splitting stories for some complex projects.
Agile Specification and Testing
- Specification by Example: Key Ideas – Gojko Adzic, co-author of the book “Specification By Example”.
- BDD in the large – Liz Keogh
- Introducing BDD – Dan North, BDD pioneer.
- The Agile Testing Pyramid – Roger Brown
UX and UI Design in Agile
- UX Design – lo-fi prototype testing (whistles.com and Edinburgh bus & tram app) (9:35)
- Resources at Jeff Patton & Associates (see the index on the right)
- Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden
Agile Architecture and Design
- Architecture & Design from LeSS website
- Neal Ford – Evolutionary Software Architectures (1:02:38)
Origins of Scrum
- The New New Product Development Game (PDF) – the HBR paper on New Product Development by Japanese companies dated January 1986 from which Scrum gets its name and many of its core concepts such as self-organisation and cross-functional ‘multi-learning’. Such research led the authors to write
- The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation.
- The Roots of Scrum: How the Japanese experience changed global software development (PDF) – Jeff Sutherland Ph.D.
- The Structure of Scrum (video) – a summary of the research and patterns that informed the formulation of Scrum by Jeff Sutherland.
- TEDx: Jeff Sutherland – The art of doing twice as much in half the time (15:50)
- Iterative and Incremental Development: A Brief History (PDF) – by Craig Larman and Victor R. Basili.
Agile & Scrum Outside of Software
- Agile Everywhere! (52:03) talk by Henrik Kniberg
- Scrum everywhere with Joe Justice – Adopting Scrum outside of technology teams – a blab with Equinox IT’s Ray Cooke
- Car construction – Wikipeed
- Insurance Business work – in Melbourne by my colleague Ben Hogan
- Legal work – by a former CSM course participant in Auckland
- TED: Bruce Feiler: Agile programming — for your family (video)
- Why Agile Isn’t Just for Technical Teams – guidance on adapting Scrum to work outside of software from Scrum inventor Jeff Sutherland and Scrum Inc. COO
- For Maximum Awesome Joe Justice Keynote 2014 – Agile, Lean, and Scrum being used outside of software – particularly in hardware development
- Scrum in Church – Co-authored by Jeff Sutherland, his wife and Chirstine Hegarty
Lean Product Development
- Six Myths of Product Development by Stefan Thomke and Donald Reinertsen.
- Lean Primer – an excellent introduction to Lean as appraise for product development
- Resource Efficiency vs. Flow Efficiency, Part 1: Seeing Your System also see Parts 2 to 5 by Johanna Rothman
- Organisation Antipattern: Dual Value Streams by Steve Smith. Points out that if you have a way to get urgent production fixes out quickly, that you should be able to do this for very small increments of new feature development too. Feature toggling may help here to avoid revealing new partially-developed functionality until it is ready for use.
- For a more advanced treatment of the principles behind Lean Product Development, I would recommend The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald G. Reinertsen.
Systems Thinking
Complexity and Cynefin
- Cynefin Framework Introduction – David Snowden
- A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making – David Snowden and Mary Boone, Harvard Business Review
- Striking the balance between analysis and feedback – Liz Keogh
Motivation and Leadership Style
Geographically Distributed Scrum
- A Conference Call in Real Life (4:05) some humour that highlights the communication challenges
- Distributed Scrum Primer by Pete Deemer
- Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde – chapter 12 Multisite and chapter 13 Offshore
- Agile Software Development: Forming Teams that Communicate and Cooperate (chapter from Agile Software Development by Alistair Cockburn)
Scaled Agile – LeSS
- Introduction to LeSS video (7:32) – note at 6:16 elimination of ‘so called “dependencies” ‘
- LeSS Complete Picture (3:08)
- Short Introduction to LeSS (8:08) – Craig Larman
- The LeSS Website
- Scaling Agile with Large-Scale Scrum (1:24:44) – Craig Larman
Scaled Agile – LeSS vs SAFe
Scaled Agile – Organisational Design
- Co-ordination Chaos video (4:05)
- Descaling Organizations with LeSS – on framing your “Product” at a customer centric level
- Q&A with Bas Vodde on the LeSS Framework: Principles, Practices and Core Concepts
- An operating model for company-wide agile development – McKinsey & Company (note that the examples described are less optimised around customer value and agility than LeSS)
- BusinessCapabilityCentric – Sriram Narayan via MartinFowler.com
Agile Portfolio Management
- Strategies for Agile Portfolio Management – as presented at Agile 2013 by Kenny Rubin and based on Chapter 16 of Kenny’s book Essential Scrum
- Portfolio Management using the Lean Canvas – by Brad Swanson
Kanban Method
- Kanban vs Scrum – making the most of both by Henrik Kniberg & Mattias Skarin
Organisational Culture
- How to Make Your Culture Work with Agile – Schneider Model (10:38)
- What Culture are you working with and how Agile is it? – a workshop on organisational culture
Agile Contracting
- Agile Contracts Primer – by Tom Arbogast, Craig Larman, and Bas Vodde
- Flexible Contracts – including FlexLite contract by Susan Atkinson and Gabrielle Benefield
- Agile Contracting in the Second Decade of Agility – talk by Simon Bennett
- Simon Bennett discusses Contracts, Scaling and Agility
- Target Cost – a shared risk, shared reward model that has been around for some time;
- Money for Nothing, Change for Free as described by Jeff Sutherland (inventor of Scrum)
Some Fun Scrum-related Videos
- S*!t Bad ScrumMasters say (3:19)
- The Impatient Product Owner (3:25)
- Cat Herders EDS ad (1:00)
- Airplane EDS ad (1:00)
- Could you use a crystal ball for risk management? (1:46)
- Scope Creep – Project Management (9:58)
- A Day in the Life of a Scrum Team (6:27)