The Practical Guide to Optimizing Product Value through Better Teamwork with Scrum “Professional Scrum is hard, not because the ideas are hard, but because it requires persistence, focus, and dedication to not let the day-to-day realities get in the way. In this book, Peter, Uwe, and Kurt have provided a collection of materials to help the Scrum Team deliver value and feel happy doing it.” --Dave West, CEO and Product Owner, Scrum.org Teams and individuals find the rules of the Scrum Framework to be easy to describe but challenging to implement. The Professional Scrum Team helps you bring the Scrum Framework rules to life in your everyday work, optimizing both team and individual performance and creating more value. Three leading Scrum experts bring together proven practices based on decades of real-life experience participating in, leading, and supporting Scrum Teams. They introduce a team as it starts out with Scrum and follow it as it gains hard-won practical experience, gradually mastering the intense collaboration that Scrum demands. As you share the team's experience--facing and overcoming realistic challenges--you'll discover better ways to work together, enhance your practices, leverage tools, continuously improve, and deliver functionality in ever-shorter cycles. Understand how Scrum Teams work, collaborate, and promote transparency Explore common problems that lead less experienced Scrum Teams to give up Find your Scrum Team's best approach to solving complex adaptive problems Integrate DevOps practices with Scrum to improve effectiveness Productively and professionally resolve conflicts that arise from close collaboration Help your organization learn how to improve its results by better supporting its Scrum Teams This guide is for anyone who works with Scrum Teams or wants to become more effective as a Scrum Team member or leader. Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

Hone Your Agile Leadership Skills to Help Your Organization Transform and Thrive To leverage the immense opportunities associated with accelerating change, organizations need teams capable of trying new ideas quickly, learning from their experiences, and adapting based on that learning. Helping these teams to grow and thrive requires agile leaders who support, inspire, and encourage, and who can leave behind the management skills of directing, monitoring, and rewarding or punishing. The Professional Agile Leader is a realistic, practical guide, written by experienced agile leaders who share their collective experiences in helping agile leaders to grow responsive and adaptive teams. They structure powerful lessons around a case study based on decades of experience helping agile leaders achieve and sustain agile transformation. Best of all, they never settle for high-level hand-waving--they show you how it's really done. Reignite once-successful organizations that have lost their way Form cross-functional teams and empower them with purpose Learn to let go, as your teams start taking more responsibility Overcome forces that want to reel you back into the "old rules" Realign the whole organization, since agile and traditional models can't coexist forever Achieve the most challenging goal of all: changing culture Great agile leaders aren't born that way--they're regular people who care deeply about helping others achieve shared goals and have discovered a better way to lead. Whatever your role in the organization, this guide will help you master those skills and mindsets a whole lot faster. "Drawing on vast experience, Ron, Kurt, and Laurens tease out practical tips and patterns for good leadership [and show] how a leader can help shape the environment for agile teams to succeed. . . . The narrative style of the book makes it easy to read, and I am sure there will be many times that you see yourself in it." --From the Foreword by Dave West, CEO and Product Owner, Scrum.org Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

The Professional Product Owner’s Guide to Maximizing Value with Scrum “This book presents a method of communicating our desires, cogently, coherently, and with a minimum of fuss and bother.” —Ken Schwaber, Chairman & Founder, Scrum.org The role of the Product Owner is more crucial than ever. But it’s about much more than mechanics: it’s about taking accountability and refocusing on value as the primary objective of all you do. In The Professional Product Owner, two leading experts in successful Scrum product ownership show exactly how to do this. You’ll learn how to identify where value can be found, measure it, and maximize it throughout your entire product lifecycle. Drawing on their combined 40+ years of experience in using agile and Scrum in product management, Don McGreal and Ralph Jocham guide you through all facets of envisioning, emerging, and maturing a product using the Scrum framework. McGreal and Jocham discuss strategy, showing how to connect Vision, Value, and Validation in ROI-focused agile product management. They lay out Scrum best-practices for managing complexity and continuously delivering value, and they define the concrete practices and tools you can use to manage Product Backlogs and release plans, all with the goal of making you a more successful Product Owner. Throughout, the authors share revealing personal experiences that illuminate obstacles to success and show how they can be overcome. Define success from the “outside in,” using external customer-driven measurements to guide development and maximize value Bring empowerment and entrepreneurship to the Product Owner’s role, and align everyone behind a shared business model Use Evidence-Based Management (EBMgt) to invest in the right places, make smarter decisions, and reduce risk Effectively apply Scrum’s Product Owner role, artifacts, and events Populate and manage Product Backlogs, and use just-in-time specifications Plan and manage releases, improve transparency, and reduce technical debt Scale your product, not your Scrum Use Scrum to inject autonomy, mastery, and purpose into your product team’s work Whatever your role in product management or agile development, this guide will help you deliver products that offer more value, more rapidly, and more often. Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

Professional guidance on using Microsoft’s Visual Studio toolset for agile project management Focusing on both process and results, this professional guide offers a practical approach to running agile software projects using Visual Studio's project management templates and tools. You’ll first get a thorough overview of the interaction between traditional, scrum-based agile development techniques and the Microsoft Soutions Framework, before drilling down into the detail. The book covers tools, best practices, key templates, key data, team and process models, necessary tracking assets—and a host of other project challenges, such as project communication, organization, and budgets. Shows how to use Microsoft’s agile Visual Studio toolset for agile project management Written by leading experts from Microsoft and industry, this is an authoritative guide to agile development for all Microsoft-based projects Teaches basic concepts through best practices for delivering great software on time Covers the interaction of traditional, scrum-based agile development techniques and the Microsoft Solutions Framework Focuses on what must be in place to keep a project on track, including team models, process models, detailed tracking assets, and more Professional Scrum with Team foundation Server 2010 combines theory with practical experience to help experienced software project managers and developers ship reliable software on time.

Master proven processes for improving development with Scrum and Azure DevOps This guide can help any development team plan, track, and manage work far more effectively, by combining today's leading agile framework (Scrum) and Microsoft's ALM/DevOps toolset (Azure DevOps). Renowned Scrum expert Richard Hundhausen thoroughly covers team formation, backlogs, Sprints, test plans, collaboration, flow, continuous improvement, Azure Boards, Azure Test Plans, and the real-world tradeoffs associated with DevOps. Throughout, you'll find practical, in-the-trenches tips from experienced Professional Scrum Developers. To make this guide even more valuable, Hundhausen has organized it to complement Scrum.org's popular Professional Scrum Developer (PSD) program, which he created with Scrum.org's Ken Schwaber, author of this book's Foreword. Professional Scrum Trainer Richard Hundhausen shows how to: Deepen your understanding of the Scrum framework and Professional Scrum as based on the 2020 Scrum Guide. Provide proven work item planning and tracking, and quickly drive value from Azure Boards Improve your Scrum “pre-game”: the tasks you'll perform before your first Sprint Use Azure DevOps to create and manage backlogs, plan Sprints, and collaborate throughout them Improve at scale with Scaled Professional Scrum and the Nexus scaled Scrum framework Recognize which practices are still most efficiently performed without tools Define and optimize team flow, overcome common dysfunctions, and evolve into a high-performance Professional Scrum Team About This Book For everyone who works with or relies on Scrum, including developers, designers, architects, testers, business analysts, Product Owners, Scrum Masters, managers, and other stakeholders Focuses primarily on using Scrum for software products, but can support development of adaptive solutions for any complex problem performance Professional Scrum Team

Practical, Proven Tools for Leading and Empowering High-Performing Agile Teams A leader is like a farmer, who doesn’t grow crops by pulling them but instead creates the perfect environment for the crops to grow and thrive. If you lead in organizations that have adopted agile methods, you know it’s crucial to create the right environment for your agile teams. Traditional tools such as Gantt charts, detailed plans, and internal KPIs aren’t adequate for complex and fast-changing markets, but merely trusting employees and teams to self-manage is insufficient as well. In Agile Leadership Toolkit, longtime agile leader Peter Koning provides a practical and invaluable steering wheel for agile leaders and their teams. Drawing on his extensive experience helping leaders drive more value from agile, Koning offers a comprehensive toolkit for continuously improving your environment, including structures, metrics, meeting techniques, and governance for creating thriving teams that build disruptive products and services. Koning thoughtfully explains how to lead agile teams at large scale and how team members fit into both the team and the wider organization. Architect environments that help teams learn, grow, and flourish for the long term Get timely feedback everyone can use to improve Co-create goals focused on the customer, not the internal organization Help teams brainstorm and visualize the value of their work to the customer Facilitate team ownership and accelerate team learning Support culture change, and design healthier team habits Make bigger changes faster This actionable guide is for leaders at all levels—whether you’re supervising your first agile team, responsible for multiple teams, or lead the entire company. Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

Building a successful product usually involves teams of people, and many choose the Scrum approach to aid in creating products that deliver the highest possible value. Implementing Scrum gives teams a collection of powerful ideas they can assemble to fit their needs and meet their goals. The ninety-four patterns contained within are elaborated nuggets of insight into Scrum’s building blocks, how they work, and how to use them. They offer novices a roadmap for starting from scratch, yet they help intermediate practitioners fine-tune or fortify their Scrum implementations. Experienced practitioners can use the patterns and supporting explanations to get a better understanding of how the parts of Scrum complement each other to solve common problems in product development. The patterns are written in the well-known Alexandrian form, whose roots in architecture and design have enjoyed broad application in the software world. The form organizes each pattern so you can navigate directly to organizational design tradeoffs or jump to the solution or rationale that makes the solution work. The patterns flow together naturally through the context sections at their beginning and end. Learn everything you need to know to master and implement Scrum one step at a time—the agile way.