We learned earlier what it is a scrum master does. Now it’s time to see what makes a product owner tick:
If this makes you want to become a scrum product owner (and we’re certain it does!), you can take one of our product owner certification classes. The next one is February 25-26, and includes a free Kindle.
Inspired by Lesbians and Lawyers. Click the image to see at full size:
If this makes you want to become a scrum master, you can take one of our certification classes. The next one is February 27-28, and includes a free Kindle.
We hear that the traditional year-one anniversary gift is paper. Does e-ink count? We think so! The Elements of Scrum is a year old, and to celebrate, Agile Learning Labs is giving a Kindle to every student in our Certified Scrum Master and Certified Scrum Product Owner classes this month.
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Last Sunday, several Agile Learning Labs team members became actors for a few hours, turning out to help our brilliant colleague Adam Weisbart film the epic drama saga, Sh*t Bad Scrum Masters Say.
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At last week’s Agile Manager’s Support Group, our very own Laura Powers, goddess of biz dev here at Agile Learning Labs, wowed us all with an exercise in personal goal-setting adapted from the basic framework of scrum. Laura knows a thing or two about meeting goals, having recently completed her first marathon.
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That was 13 minutes’ worth of Chris. If you’d like more, you can read our book, The Elements of Scrum, sign up for a public class, or even hire Chris to ride into your company on a white horse and save the day. Or deliver a brown bag. He can do both.
Thank you for the certified scrum master training last week in Beijing. Your training is very impressive, and I appreciate it a lot. I asked you a lot of questions; may I ask one more? In our company, the automation for regression tests hasn’t been set up, yet. Without automation of the regressions tests, unit test, and pair-programming, how can our scrum team improve the quality of the product?
First, let me encourage you to keep up the work to automate your regression tests. Few things have as big a return on investment. Test automation enables the team to move much faster and make improvements fearlessly. The other practices you mention: unit testing and pair programming, are also great practices, and I encourage your team to try them too.
Having said that, your question was what else could your team do. Additional practices I would recommend your team consider are: code reviews, frequent testing by real users, testing bashes, and whole-team ownership of quality and testing.
Artist, illustrator and graphic facilitator Elizabeth McClellan is one of my favorite people, proving as she always does that the kind of work we do here at Agile Learning Labs–and what our clients do when they develop software–is as much art as it is business. Last June, as Chris blogged recently, Elizabeth recorded everything that happened in one of our Certified Scrum Master Workshops in her inimitable style. This week, she did the same for our Certified Product Owner course in Redwood City. Click on each image to see it in all its detail and glory.
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I am always looking for others who are experimenting in the arena of agile publishing, as we are doing with our side venture, Dymaxicon, and I ran across a fascinating article today on a Bryn Mawr college blog called Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education. The article is by Rebecca Pope-Ruark (affectionately nicknamed RPR by her students), a professor of Writing and Publishing at Elon University in North Carolina who learned about scrum from her geek husband and decided to try using it to teach collaboration skills to her students, who would be working on some publishing projects. (Since it’s academia, the blog post is also co-authored by several of her students–apparently publish or perish extends to blogging now.)
I loved the description of how the students viewed “collaboration” before the project:
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Scrum masters and product owners know how hard it is to get their team to become high-performing. They can rest assured that they’re on the right track. Scrum helps teams become high-performing faster than other work methods. The reason is simple. Becoming high-performing is baked into the scrum recipe. In my experience coaching agile teams, I have observed over and over that teams that use scrum go from forming, storming, norming and ultimately to high-performing more quickly and reliably than teams that don’t. Here are five reasons why:
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