LATEST BLOG POSTS

Everyone talks about agility Agility is a way of behaving, a philosophy that supports maximising the value of the  created product, accepting and even exploiting changes while being in the workflow. But agility is not a panacea. It requires the right knowledge, practice and commitment…

At the beginning of a Scrum training I often ask participants if they can name a Scrum practice. Almost without exception, the answer arrives quickly: the Daily Standup. It seems like everyone is doing it, whether they work in Scrum or not. Some people even…

In our article “Who is the Scrum Master?” we examined what the general responsibilities of a Scrum Master are, who makes a good Scrum Master and the role of certificates in the training process. In this article we take a closer look at how a…

Today we want to tell you about a simple trick: a different kind of standup meeting. The daily standup is the most famous – the most notorious – element of Scrum; to this day, there are leaders who think that if a few people stand…

The Scrum framework defines only three roles of accountabilities: the Product Owner, the Scrum Master and the Developers. The responsibilities are clear and the boundaries are sharp and well defined: – The Product Owner owns the product from a business perspective and decides what the…

You can’t count how many times we hear this idea: one of our developers will be 50% Scrum Master and it’s done. We’ve even heard 10%. Problem solved. We don’t have to deal with the hiring and training of a separate Scrum Master, our Scrum…

Sustainability is the final topic in our series interpreting the principles of the Agile Manifesto, which is twenty-two years old this year. (Previous articles in the series can be found here: customer satisfaction, change vs product design, team, communication. The importance of sustainability, and the…

I get the above sentence in the face over and over again. And how true it is, isn’t it? Well, no! What? How could it not? Why not? No, because retrospective is not the way to solve problems. Now get your chin off the ground…

And time and time again, the team fills their sprint with work, which they are then unable to complete by the end of the sprint! Oh dear! More and more slips into the next sprint, the frustration and pressure builds, so they take on more…

The next topic in our series on Agile principles is communication. (Previous articles of this series can be found here: customer satisfaction, change vs planning, team.) In a nutshell: Agile puts personal communication first. This is underlined by the sixth principle of the Agile Manifesto:…

It’s not news to anyone that the pandemic has caused many people to withdraw to their home offices, in one form or another. But what happens to teams using Agile methodologies, since agility puts a strong emphasis on personal presence and personal communication. Won’t they…

After the topics of customer satisfaction and change vs product design, we continue our series on interpreting Agile principles with the question of teams. When the Agile principles emerged, many product development teams were operating as much looser units and with much less autonomy than…

We continue the analysis of the article linked in the previous post with the following half-sentence: ‘Scrum practice of ignoring peoples’ career goals and their individual talents’. Unfortunately, the fact is that there are plenty of Scrum implementations where the above statement has become true….

The confusion between the terms “team” and “group” is a common phenomenon. A few people get chosen, told that they are a team, maybe even are put in the same office, and then are expected to perform a miracle. The miracle doesn’t come. Because there…

On 22 and 23 September the first Agile Get-Together glocal Agile conference took place in Budapest and thanks to online streaming worldwide, organised by Sprint Consulting and UST. The main sponsor of the event was Morgan Stanley. The conference keynote speakers Diana Larsen, Linda Rising…

On 22 and 23 September the first Agile Get-Together glocal Agile conference took place in Budapest and thanks to online streaming worldwide, organised by Sprint Consulting and UST. The main sponsor of the event was Morgan Stanley. The conference keynote speakers Diana Larsen, Linda Rising…

In a comment on our previous post “Team morale in agility“, we received criticism for mentioning the issue of salary increases when discussing morale.

The sentence analysed in the previous post continues; the full sentence reads “If you carry this way of working on for months or years, you get a lot of technical debt and you get low morale”. The second part of the statement is particularly interesting…

“If you carry this way of working on for months or years, you get a lot of technical debt …” says the article analysed in our series on agile methodologies. A major shortcoming of the paper is that it only states, but does not justify;…

Although the agile movement is product-centric, for a long time it focused on a single product. This is also the case with the most widely used agile methodology, Scrum, which can be a great framework for a product development team, but its shortcomings can become…

A common mistake in agile transformations is that the organisation gets so caught up in making changes and changing that it fails to recognise the values it should be preserving as it changes. As a result, transformations will not only be more costly than necessary,…

On 22 and 23 September the first Agile Get-Together glocal agile conference, organised by Sprint Consulting and UST took place in Budapest and thanks to online streaming, worldwide as well. The main sponsor of the event was Morgan Stanley. The conference provided a valuable overview…

The classical theory of leadership, honed over a century, has been enriched with new characteristics, techniques and insights with the rise of Agility. What is the difference between a manager and a leader? When and how is it recommended to lead teams with different levels…

In addition to customer satisfaction, an important central idea of agility is to prepare for change. As a customer, as a client, this is perhaps the most attractive proposition of agility, but on the development side the idea that requirements can change late in the…

In our new series, we analyse the principles of the Agile Manifesto in detail, according to their original purpose, what they tell us about the agile mindset and about which organisations and industries agile might be appropriate for. The main goal of agility is customer…

As the pandemic winds down, employers are asking even more frequently whether they should continue to provide work-from-home opportunities or whether they should return to the pre-pandemic situation. Although the majority of managers eventually decide to keep the home office as an option, some still…

Scrum has been the most widely used Agile framework since its inception and still is today. Its popularity is demonstrated by the fact that the word Scrum is sometimes used as a synonym for Agile, which unfortunately leads to many misunderstandings. It is therefore important…

Fashion? A fad? Or a truly valuable asset? What does it have to do with IT? Can it be used in other industries? This article answers these and other key questions often asked about agile methodologies.

For many people, the first encounter with an agile team is an almost surreal experience: serious, educated people standing in front of a wall covered in colourful sticky notes, gesticulating wildly and arguing about something with faces aglow. What are these strange rituals, what is…

Summary analysis from the official Hungarian translators: The latest Scrum Guide was published in November 2020. As official Hungarian translators of the new Scrum Guide, we would like to share the main changes with you.

“Progress is inevitable: in a world on the move, what does not evolve will decline.” This saying by Argentine writer, poet and philosopher Jorge Ángel Livraga became a cliché by now, but it remains valid. Our world being in constant motion, business is of course…

The Scrum Alliance programme for Agile leaders – so far known as CAL I – is now divided into three sub-courses: CAL-Essentials, CAL-Teams, and CAL-Organizations. The aim was to innovate in order to provide a more flexible, customizable training path for leaders looking to learn.

“I’d like to attend a Scrum Master or Product Owner training, which one should I select? What is the difference between the Advanced, Certified and the Advanced Certified course?”

Delegation is a quite important task in the life of a leader. In this article, we will present how to carry out delegation and which levels it has.

There are a lot of misconceptions about metrics inside and outside of the agile world. Metrics are tools providing feedback about one single aspect of an area under surveillance, and nothing more. They are not goals. It is dangerous to derive conclusions based on a…

It’s a known fact, that agility is rooted in Lean. Unfortunately Lean principles are only present implicitly in the methodology, their original form is not apparent. This can be one of the main reasons why we often have the impression during an agile transformation that…

“If you carry this way of working on for months or years, you get a lot of technical debt …” states the blogpost we have been covering recently. Unfortunately, it is only a declaration, lacking any kind of explanation. Therefore it is impossible to argue…

We continue analyzing the blogpost that we have been covering in the previous posts by taking a look at the next phrase: “Scrum practice of ignoring peoples’ career goals and their individual talents”.

There is a blogpost on quora.com dealing with the topic of why some developers in prominent companies think of agile methodology as nonsense. The post concludes that the agile model is only usable for time-critical, short term projects lasting a maximum of six weeks. It…

Opening a business is tough, even if we have a great product idea. How do we become successful on the market? How will our product create revenue? What expenses are to be expected?

In today’s post we take a deeper look at a statement from the essay we have already been covering in a series of Hungarian blogposts. The passage we would like to analyse states: “Product development and architecture aren’t the programmer’s job, because they take longer…

This practice comes in handy when the Product Owner cannot decide on the importance of several items with, seemingly equal importance.

The terms “team” and “group” are quite often mixed up. It is not uncommon for a bunch of individuals to be huddled together (they might even be moved to sit next to each other in the same area) and be told that now they are…

Have you heard the phrase “Everything is important!” or “Everything is top priority”? Such statements can result in effects that ripple through product development. No matter what, delivery teams will have the same work capacity and they won’t be able to deliver more. Forcing the…

In today’s “big data world”, companies have the opportunity to access all the information they need to strive for creating great products and services, yet they often fail to deliver the right ones to customers. Research shows that customers don’t really care about seven out…

There are two team definitions in Scrum which can sometimes be confusing. The Scrum team by definition is a self-organizing cross-functional team that regularly delivers potentially shippable product increments.

For any successful agile transformation it is essential to train all three involved parties (management, delivery and business side) within an organization – says Árpád Zsolt Bodó, the founder of Sprint Consulting. Today an agile training program, built into the employers’ compensation packages, is very…

Telecommunications industry, as a long-time leading sector of Information and Communication Technology, is always pushing the boundaries of IT and often the first to get over an obstacle the others are yet to encounter. As for realizing the benefits of adopting agility, as early as…

Kanban is a less-known methodology than Scrum. But it is more often considered as an alternative to Scrum. Indeed, there is an intersection between the application areas of these frameworks, but their characteristics have major differences. Therefore it is worth to overview which one to…

We would like to clarify a couple of often misunderstood concepts: the difference between Acceptance Criteria and Definition of Done. In many organisations, these two are confused, there is no clear boundary between them, even though they have completely different meanings and serve different purposes.