The last Agile Manifesto principle states that “At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.” For Scrum teams, the sprint retrospective is therefore a key meeting for continuous improvement. The results are however not always satisfying. In his book “Essential Scrum“, Kenneth Rubin discusses the most common issues in sprint retrospectives that he has noticed in his Agile coaching experience.

A kaizen board is a simple yet powerful visual tool to add to your Agile tool kit. Based on Agile principles, the tool facilitates effective Agile retrospectives and prevents some of the more common sprint retrospective pathologies.

An Agile coach can ascertain a great deal about a Scrum team in 15 minutes. Observing a team's Daily Scrum can give us insight into the health of the Scrum process. A team's Daily Scrum is like the pulse of a human being. There is no chance that anyone could produce an exceptional performance with an unhealthy heart pulse, and neither could a Scrum team.

If delivering business value should be the main goal of a software development project, not all the developers’ activities are contributing to this objective. In his book ” Scrum Shortcuts without Cutting Corners”, Ilan Goldstein discusses how you should deal with bugs and the technical aspects of your software project.

The idea of self-organizing teams has been called the secret sauce of agile software development. This paper is an attempt to systemize how to think about and how to develop healthy self-organization.

Even if Agile was initially considered as an anarchic approach due to practices like self-organization, the reality is that it requires a lot of discipline. Metrics is an important tool to assess the continuous improvement efforts of Scrum teams. However, setting a good metric program is not obvious.

Often teams struggle with picking the right-sized user story. The story either ends up being too small and hence of no value to the user, or it ends up being too huge and doesn't get completed in the planned sprint.

Scrumban is a management framework that emerges when teams employ Scrum as their chosen way of working and use the Kanban Method as a lens through which to view, understand and continuously improve how they work. This article explains what Scrumban is and how the framework can improve your projects.

Assessment is essential, not only to guide the development of individuals but also to monitor and continuously improve the quality of deliverables and provide evidence of accountability to those who pay our way. Teams acquire a skill much more rapidly if they receive feedback about what they have done. One of the most important roles for assessment is the provision of timely and informative feedback so that practice of a skill and its ultimate acquisition will be effective and efficient.

User stories are not merely an engineering requirement fashion. They are a simple but powerful and sophisticated way to gather requirements. They are also an Agile way to obtain the detail of the software through iterations that will, each time or during each review, gain more detail.